Links 20 December 2024

Not posting much because I have been busy with relocating cemeteries at Oak Hill in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, which you can read about here.

What to the people of Syria want, after emerging from the nightmare of Arab Socialism under Assad? Human rights, women's rights, tolerance of minorities, and free markets: neoliberalism.

Scott Siskind on a fascinating experiment Anthropic did on their Claude AI, seeing if it would resist attempts to turn it evil. It does.

Speaking of evil, captured documents reveal that one purpose of the Assad regime's torture program was to extort money from the families of the arrested.

Bunch of senior scientists issue a fat report arguing that research on "mirror cells" – forms of life built around mirror-image molecules, such as right-handed proteins – poses a dire threat to existing life and should be halted. (NY Times, Smithsonian, The Scientist)

"The Balkans are disappearing. . . . the region’s population is shrinking at a faster rate than almost anywhere else on earth due to a combination of emigration and low fertility rates." More people born in Bosnia live outside it than in, and a recent survey found that across the whole region, 44% are thinking of leaving. Interesting article at The Baffler with lots of detail.

America is getting less polarized. (Washington Post) But maybe the correct analysis is we're getting polarized along new lines.

Via Kevin Drum, an academic paper that calculated the European regicide rate over the past 1400 years, finding that it has declined a lot.

Scale armor found in a 1st century BC Chinese tomb.

Two separate studies find that the inbreeding between humans and Neanderthals occured in one period, c. 50,500 to 43,500 years ago.

Another claim that the earth contains huge amounts of hydrogen that we could drill for and use. Something about these claims makes me skeptical, perhaps because it is too much like what people want to be true.

China's North South Water Diversion Project, an enormous effort to supply water to the dry north. Two routes are already operating: the East Route, which is a modernized version of the old Grand Canal, and the Central Route, a gravity canal from a tributary of the Yangtze to Beijing. But enormous as these projects are, there is still not enough water in the north, so plans are underway for more canals. More details at wikipedia.

Controversial essay on how to promote gender equality without generating backlash.

Britain's Bronze Age cannibal massacre.

Eight Remarkable Scientific Firsts of 2024 is a pretty lame list.

Bah to this dumb article about archaeology at Çatalhöyük, all about Ian Hodder's "new" interpretation of the site, which Hodder first presented in 1992. He wrote a popular book about the site in 2006. Sigh. Some people just can't write about scholarship unless they can set up a dumb old orthodoxy and an exciting new idea.

Good piece about the current German malaise, by Anna Sauerbrey in the NY Times. One important piece is an energy shortage caused by the bizarre decision to close all their nuclear power plants while also phasing out coal and trying to quit Russian natural gas. Another is that Germany profited for decades selling machine tools etc. to China, but this helped Chinese manufacturers reach the point where they are outcompeting the Germans.

Squirrels hunting and eating smaller mammals. This is presented as surprising but they are from the rodent tribe, a very shifty and opportunistic bunch.

Too long but still interesting essay on Charles Fort and his Book of the Damned, which emerged from a weird intellectual madness.

First interviews with Assad regime soldiers are coming out in the western press. Keynote: "There was nothing coming through at all on the radio. There were no orders from senior officers. Just silence. It soon became apparent that it was every man for himself."

Collection of recent anti-Putin jokes, from Russia. Via Scott Siskind's December links post.

Some Demography

In ancient and medieval societies, cities always had higher death rates than the countryside, and only matinained their populations due to immigration. Now urban areas have lower death rates. When did that change? A careful study of French data finds that the switch didn't happen until the 1940s.

And now to the thing demographers mainly talk and tweet about, fertility decline. I am not myself full of doom about declining birth rates, partly because I remember population bomb doomsterism from the 1970s and so don't trust anybody's 50-year projections. But I am tracking the remarkable decline in fertility around the world and wondering what it will mean.

Despite massive government spending to encourage childbirth, Poland now has the lowest total fertility of any EU state, 1.11. The previous front-runner was Spain, which held steady at 1.13.

Meanwhile in the US total fertility is holding steady around 1.62; interesting that white fertility surpassed that of black Americans for the first time ever, 1.534 > 1.529. I would call that a tie, but these are very accurate numbers, and the difference would have been greater except for women born in Haiti. 

Dramatic fertility declines in Latin America over the past decade:

* Argentina 2.25 to 1.25
* Mexico 2.11 to 1.45
* Colombia 1.94 to 1.21
* Chile 1.78 to 0.88

Most of the high birth rate nations in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa, but some demographers have been predicting birth rate collapse in those nations for a decade, it looks to be happening. For example, in Lesotho, total fertility has fallen from 3.5 in 2004 to 2.5 today, and the rate of decrease appears to be accelerating.

And this: "Iran is the greatest example of how superficial traditionalism does nothing. Iran is on the same track regarding metrics like birthrate, GDP, female university attendance, that you would expect if the Shah had never fallen. Average modernizing middle income country." Sometimes, in some ways, stuff like elections matters a lot, but sometimes it seems like everything else is downstream of the basic techno-cultural system.

Links 13 December 2024

The new Syrian leadership issues a statement forbidding anyone from harassing women about their dress or preventing reporters from doing their job. Seems like a carefuly chosen signal.

A smaller share of Americans moved in 2023 than ever before.

Thinking too hard about Kafka's short story, "Investigations of a Dog."

Google's new quantum chip: "Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse." Seems a tad overblown.

Scott Aaronson on Google's new quantum chip. He is impressed, and he has been demolishing overblown quantum computing claims for years. But he also waves off the multiverse business.

The corruption trial of former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan provides a good primer on how local corruption works in America. The basic deal was that he expected everyone who wanted his help to hire his tax law firm. There are other, more flagrant allegations, but the center of it was the miscegenation of politics and legal services.

The Trump Organization has been making money in India, selling their name to developers who crave the status they think the name conveys. There will likely be 10 Trump-branded buildings in India before 2028. Any guesses as to how Trump will treat the Modi government? (NY Times)

Daniel Penny is acquitted in the death Jordan Neely, a homeless man who was making trouble on the NY subway. This is another sign that Americans have had enough of crazy homeless people. If we can't find humane solutions the anger will only grow and we could see increasing pressure for mass incarceration. In the current climate you could probably wade into a homeless camp laying around you with a baseball bat and be in no legal jeopardy.

There is a unique subspecies of mosquito that lives in the London Underground.

Kevin Drum, more on how great things are in America.

Egypt is declared malaria free, quite an accomplishment for a nation that has suffered from this disease for at least 4,000 years.

Don't worry about your black plastic kitchen utensils.

The Raytheon Coyote drone has a variant designed to destroy other small drones by crashing into them, with a top speed of more than 300 mph. (wikipedia, ad from the manufacturer). Incidentally the Coyote is part of a system called Low, Slow, Small UAV Integrated Defeat System, or LIDS. If you install such a system in a fixed location, say an airfield, then you have a Fixed Site Low, Slow, Small UAV Integrated Defeat System, FIS-LIDS, pronounced "Fizz Lids". They seem to work pretty well but think how many of these drones you would need for a real war.

A statistical paradox: schizophrenia is about 80% genetic, but "The Nazis ran a eugenics program that killed most of the schizophrenics in Germany, eliminating their genes from the gene pool. But the next generation of Germans had a totally normal schizophrenia rate, comparable to pre-Nazi Germany or any other country." Via Scott Siskind.

Study finds that places within the old Soviet Union that were near labor camps where political prisoners were sent are now more prosperous than similar places without camps.

The Fish & Wildlife Service proposes listing the Monarch Butterfly as a threatened species. This would be a big deal, since just about any meadow in the central or eastern US is potential monarch habitat.

The engineer accused of selling America's stealth bomber secrets to China.

The Washington Post reports that Kyiv supplied drones and experienced operators to HTS to assist in their offensive against Assad. Hints go back as far as June.

Russia has been staging raids across the Dnipro River near Kherson. The casualty rate is so high that, according to this report, Russian soldiers have been sabotaging their boats so they don't have to go.

Did Iran and Russia decide to give up on Assad, or did things just move so quickly that they were unable to respond? (Twitter/X) I would note that Americans are used to our military being able to respond quickly almost anywhere in the world, but nobody else has that capability, so I find it believable that Iran was not able to mount an effective response within 11 days.

Paul Krugman's Last NYT Column

Paul Krugman is retiring as a regular NY Times columnist. In his last column, he reflects on how much America has changed since he took the job in 2000:

What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired.

It’s hard to convey just how good most Americans were feeling in 1999 and early 2000. Polls showed a level of satisfaction with the direction of the country that looks surreal by today’s standards.

I agree with this. In fact I was so bemused by the level of optimism (me! the resident optimist!) that a friend and I started designing a series of "Real History" quarters that would showcase the dark side of the American past. Like, California would have the internment of Japanese Americans, Tennessee the Fort Pillow Massacre, Virginia the Second Powhatan War, Kentucky the Hatfields and McCoys, West Virginia the coal field wars, etc.

Anyway.

Why did this optimism curdle? As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest.

It was not always thus. Back in 2002 and ’03, those of us who argued that the case for invading Iraq was fundamentally fraudulent received a lot of pushback from people refusing to believe that an American president would do such a thing. Who would say that now?

In a different way, the financial crisis of 2008 undermined any faith the public had that governments knew how to manage economies. The euro as a currency survived the European crisis that peaked in 2012, which sent unemployment in some countries to Great Depression levels, but trust in Eurocrats — and belief in a bright European future — didn’t.

It’s not just governments that have lost the public’s trust. It’s astonishing to look back and see how much more favorably banks were viewed before the financial crisis.

Obviously there is something to this, but I think this contrast (which you see all over, not just from Krugman) is way overblown.

I remember the 1970s: stagflation, the rust belt, people paying $5 to take sledegehammer whacks at Japanese cars, widespread fear of environmental poisons. In the 1960s we had the Vietnam War and a vast rebellion against the state's wisdom, hippies and their attack on bourgeois life, terrorists who set off far more bombs than we saw in the 90s or have seen lately. I could go on, but I really don't think there was ever an era when Americans had great trust in experts.

The places I see the biggest change are in the media and in government. In the era of three, highly-regulated TV networks and powerful newspapers the press did a lot of pretending to be neutral and above the fray. There were highly partisan media but they were pretty obscure; one of my friends in middle school came from a family of cranky libertarians and they subscribed to mimeographed newsletters sent through the mail. The big first crack in the wall came with AM talk radio, Rush Limbaugh and so on. Then Fox News, then the internet. 

To the extent that people ever did respect our leaders, it was partly because the dominant media worked hard to create that respect.

The change within Congress has been equally profound. I see this starting with Newt Gingrich in the 90s, a new breed of legislators who cared only about fighting for their side, nothing set aside for respect of the Halls of Congress or whatever.

It may be that the respectful America I grew up in was a unique product of the Cold War and the post-World War II boom, doomed to eventual collapse. Congress was often an ugly place in the nineteenth century, and Yellow Journalism was a real thing. Maybe we're just living through regression to the mean.

Krugman:

So is there a way out of the grim place we’re in? What I believe is that while resentment can put bad people in power, in the long run it can’t keep them there. At some point the public will realize that most politicians railing against elites actually are elites in every sense that matters and start to hold them accountable for their failure to deliver on their promises. And at that point the public may be willing to listen to people who don’t try to argue from authority, don’t make false promises, but do try to tell the truth as best they can.

Maybe.

The Insane Details of the South Korean Coup Attempt

Via The Blue Roof on Twitter/X. The source is testimony to the National Assembly's Defense Committee, which is investigating the coup:

To arrest key liberal leaders including Lee Jae-myung, the military dispatched the HID unit, the special forces whose main task is to assassinate major North Korean leaders in case of a war. They are normally near the DMZ, but were just outside of Seoul on Dec 3.

The HID unit were not dressed in the ROK military uniform. Instead, they were given a false North Korean uniform. The plan was to have the HID unit either assassinate Lee and others, and if that failed, have the "rescuing" South Korean soldiers to kill both Lee and the HID unit.

The Defense Minister's original plan was to provoke an attack from North Korea, then use that as an excuse to declare martial law. To that end, South Korean military flew several drones over the Pyongyang sky, spraying propaganda fliers. North Korea did not attack, however. . . .

Yoon Suk-yeol directly commanded the military at the scene of the National Assembly to arrest the lawmakers. The president personally called Cdr. Gwak Jong-geun and told him: "They don't have quorum yet. Get in there and drag them all out."

During the coup, helicopters carrying special forces headed to the Assembly were held up at the capital no-fly zone, because the Air Force was not aware of the coup plan. In the end, the Air Force never approved the flight; the Army forged the approval order.

According to other testimony, planning for the coup began in July 2023. The plotters had more units of special forces ready to deploy to Seoul but halted them when the Assembly rescinded the martial law order. Our reporter thinks that might have led to a massacre, but other military observers have noted that the troops deployed to the National Assembly building did not have live rounds in their guns.

The farce has continued since the failure, with one spokesman saying the president ordered the coup because he was lonely and depressed, and one of his top aids trying to commit suicide by choking himself on his underpants.

Weird place, Korea. Of course other sources are denying this, but obviously something very weird happened.

Consulting the Ancestors in Neolithic Italy

Around 5500 to 5400 BC, Neolithic people at Masseria Candelaro in southeastern Italy buried parts of  about 15 skulls within a structure in the center of the village. They all probably came from mature men. The archaeologists who found them naturally wondered what this was about. 

They first asked who these people had been, since the ethnographic literature describes several modes of head keeping. In particular, sometimes the heads are those of revered ancestors, while in other cases they are those of slain enemies. But none of these skulls showed evidence of trauma caused at or just after death, so "revered ancestors" seemed more likely. 

Why were the skulls fragmentary? The archaeologists searched for patterns, but none emerged. The discarding of various bones did not seem to be deliberate. As best they could tell, the skulls had gradually decayed because they were repeatedly buried and dug up again over a period of about two centuries. 

Imagine: the people face a crisis, possibly a natural disaster like a drought of a plague of locusts, or perhaps attack by a powerful enemy. The shaman and the headman go into the ancestors' hut and carefully exhume the skulls from their burial pit. They are placed on some kind of table or altar. The people gather by star- or firelight in search of guidance. Perhaps they are chanting, or perhaps they are completely silent. By some means, the question is put to the ancestors, and the answer divined: a sacrifice must be made, or a fast observed, or perhaps the village must be moved. The skulls are carefully reburied until the next time they are needed. It's a wonderful picture.

Abstract of the article:

When archaeologists discuss ‘ancestor cults’ or ‘ancestor veneration’, what this might entail in practice usually remains vague, leading to charges that the concept of ‘ancestors’ is often applied generically. In this article, the authors combine bioarchaeological, taphonomic, radiocarbon, and isotopic studies to explore the ritual practice of the selective retention, curation, and deposition of a group of human crania and mandibles. Between 5500–5400 bc, Neolithic people at Masseria Candelaro (Puglia, Italy) deposited broken crania and mandibles from about fifteen individuals in a heap in the centre of the village. These individuals were mostly probable males, collected over the course of two centuries and actively used, with their deposition marking the final disposal of a ritual collection. The motivations for the curation of cranial bone are investigated through comparison with archaeological and ethnographic examples, advancing an interpretation of ritual practice directed towards ancestors. 

Key passages:

Moreover, ancestors do not just happen; they are made. Rituals directed toward the ancestors are not the same as standard funerary rites. While their presence amongst the living references the past, ancestral rituals are forward-looking: they project the ancestors into current socio-political concerns, legitimizing tradition through continuity, and demanding action. The ontological transformation of a dead person into an ancestor is almost always accomplished by transforming their physical remains. Extended post-mortem treatment, such as secondary burial or curating selected bones, provides material through which the memory of dead persons can be prolonged. Curated bones may be circulated among the living, transformed into items which can be carried, worn, used, or eventually reburied. Bodies of specific individuals or ancestors may be preserved to allow for their display or procession amongst the living. Once ancestors are made, they act socially. Their remains are therefore likely to have an ongoing biography, encompassing use, modification, exchange, and disposal. Because these are material processes, they may be documented archaeologically. . . .

It seems most likely that these crania and mandibles were retrieved from burials post-mortem and actively used over a century or more. Their circulation and handling caused further breakage, perhaps explaining why some crania are represented by multiple, morphologically similar but non-refitting, fragments.

Middle Eastern Dominos

It strikes me that October 7 is turning out to be the most consequential regional event in a long time, certainly since the Arab spring of 2011 and maybe since the US invasion of Iraq. American officials are cheering the failure of Iranian ambitions along the arc through Iraq and Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and some Arabs thinking the same way:

A new Middle East is taking shape, with the Iran-led axis facing a significant setback. The Lebanon ceasefire marked a pivotal moment, signaling the end of an era and the onset of a political upheaval for the Iran-backed Axis of Resistance.

Here's a tweet with some good background on HTS and their leader. He calls himself "Abu Muhammad al-Jolani," a nom de guerre that references his desire to retake the Golan Heights from Israel. The sources I have found are very much divided on al-Jolani, some thinking he has changed his tone and beliefs, others thinking he is a violent jihadist in sheep's clothing.

A Syrian:

I hope now people will stop asking us if we regret launching the revolution. We regret nothing. We dared to dream, and we will not regret the struggle for our dignity.

How many refugees will return? Some are already crossing the border from refugee camps, but what about the ones in Europe? Some are tweeting about how excited they are to return, but much depends on what happens in Syria over the next month.

It was only 11 days from the launching of the rebel offensive to the fall of Assad.

Assad is Gone

Astonishing scenes of jubilation in Syria, wonderful to see.

Now comes the hard part.

We Are Not Taken in By Your Lies

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski at the OSCE meeting on December 5:

Elina has just reminded us of the origin of this organization. The Helsinki process was basically a grand bargain between the then communist bloc, which sought the confirmation of borders in Europe, and the then west, which wanted respect for human rights in the Soviet bloc. Today Russia respects neither borders nor human rights. There are no free media in Russia, there are no honest elections, and there are more political prisoners than in the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev at the time of Helsinki. When the Soviet Union collapsed, we encouraged Russia to become a normal democratic nation state. But they failed. It proved too difficult to emerge from their own political culture. Russia's rulers chose the path of aggressive, repressive kleptocracy.  

My message to the Russian delegation is the following: We are not taken in by your lies. We know what you're doing. You're trying to rebuild the Russian empire and we will not let you. We will resist you every inch of the way. And the Russian war criminal at this table must know: Ukraine will win this war and justice will prevail.

Links 6 December 2024

Lioness Devouring a Man, Phoenician

ivory found in the Palace of Ashurbanipal

at Nimrud, c 800 BC.

Orcas not only have fads, they have retro fads.

Google's new AI, GenCast, is the best weather forecaster on the planet (NY Times, summary from Kevin Drum)

Huge hoard of Roman coins from the reign of Nero found in England.

Post-disaster rebuilds as a model for getting infrastructure done faster. (article, thread)

Amidst the "shadow depression" and all the other supposed woes of the US economy, online sales this Cyber Monday smashed the previous record for online commerce in a day.

The scale of Russian online manipulation efforts: Tiktok recently removed 66,000 bot accounts with 10 million bot followers, all involved in attempting to sway the recent election in Romania.

India strikes a deal with 30 scientific publishers to give all Indian students and academics access to most of the top journals, for $715 million over three years.

Seven-minute video with views of the interior of Notre Dame after its 700 million Euro restoration, much lighter and more colorful than before the fire. Photos here. Longer video on the restoration here. The restoration relied heavily on the very detailed plans made during the restoration of 1844.

Kevin Drum asks why Veterans' Administration disability payments have gone up so much.

Claims from Chinese researchers of a new type of human living in Asia around 200,000 years ago. (News piece, original article)

Major sacrifice of Iron Age weapons found in Denmark. 

Noah Smith worries that China will dominate global manufacturing and thus the world: "manufacturing is war now."

Solo polyamory. It sounds like a right-wing joke but apparently it is something people have actually said about themselves, like the self-proclaimed Asexuals who have sex and the Queer people who only have regular heterosexual relationships. Sometimes you just shake your head and move on.

According to this study, giving people $1,000 a month for three years has little impact on their political views, except that they become more supportive of work requirements for welfare.

Peace and a real estate boom in Kabul, Afghanistan.

A claim that "green corridors" have cooled the city of Medellin, Colombia reversing urban heat island effect.

Scott Siskind on modern architecture, which he hates.

Stone tablet carved in an unknown language found in (European) Georgia. The symbols do resemble those used in Middle Eastern scripts, but they seem to be unique.

The use and misuse of Aristotle in political debate from the Renaissance onward.

Chemical analysis of the Anzick baby suggests that the Clovis people of North America ate a lot of mammoth, but drawing conclusions from the skeleton of one 18-month-old seems shaky to me.

Benjamin Franklin as a scientist.

The rebellion spreads to Syria's south, with the first southern town in open rebellion. And the first rebel drone attacks on Russia's main airbase in Syria. As to where they get their drones, Iran's FM just called on Ukraine to "cease its support for terrorism in Syria."

The Han emperors and "blood-sweating" horses.

Thoughts on that "last universal common ancestor."

Nostalgia for the retro-future.

Putin enjoys making nuclear threats but meanwhile there are reports that Russia has formed a Motor Rifle Regiment from troops who had been assigned to nuclear duties.

One thing Elon Musk and the US Air Force brass are going to agree on is comparatively cheap, air-launched cruise missiles like the Barracuda from AI company Anduril. Companies are competing savagely for an order they expect to be as many as 100,000 missiles. Such a stockpile does strike me as a pretty effective deterrent against some enemies.

Update on Ukrainian drone production:

• They have purchased 1.6 million drones in 2024.
• They are "working on drones to intercept the Shahed-type long-range attack drones that Russia uses for its nightly attacks on Ukrainian cities."
• Next year they expect to produce "tens of thousands" of ground drones for ferrying ammunition to frontline positions and evacuating wounded.
• Next year they also expect to produce 30,000 long-range attack drones. 
• They have ten companies working on AI drones with self targeting, and they hope to field their first AI drone swarm soon.

The Fall of Hama and the Hopes of Syrians

Syrian rebels have taken Hama, a city of one million people and the site of some important recent history: the massacre of 1982, and the protests of 2011. Huge crowds came out into the street to cheer the rebel victory, and to welcome released prisoners, some of whom were protesters of 2011 who had been behind bars ever since. And the rebels are not stopping: "The Battle for Hama is over, the Battle for Homs now begins." 

The fall of Hama seems significant to me because there was no surprise here; the Syrian army drove out the first wave of rebels, brought up significant reinforcements, and had time to establish a defense before the main rebel force arrived. Russian fighter bombers attacked the rebels. But it didn't matter, and the government's defenses crumbled within four days. They are just getting beaten, plain and simple.

Video of the Assad statue in Hama toppling.

It is amazing to read online how some Syrians are reacting to these events. Like this:

I’m crying. I can’t describe how happy I am. My dad was only 5 years old when Baathists stole the country and he only survived the Assad massacre in 1982 by a miracle. He died 8 years ago in exile with his heart aching for Syria. I love you dad. I wish you could see this. 

Or this:

After 10 years in exile. I am finally going back home! Syria is being freed!

Or this:

Stunning images are emerging from Hama, as reports confirm the release of thousands of prisoners from Assad's dungeons. Many were presumed dead, their survival unimaginable, yet now against all odds, they're free.

Or this:

Assadists in total meltdown. Revolutionaries celebrating in the streets. A series of events many wrote off as impossible taking place before our very eyes.

Oz Katerji, the Lebanese journalist we discussed here a few days ago, has this to say to western pragmatists who supported Assad to bring "stability" to Syria and fear what revolution will bring:

What is happening in Syria today is happening in spite of those foreign policy decisions, and in spite of those who presented Assad’s victory as the only possible resolution to the Syrian civil war. I can’t stress this enough, these people genuinely believed that the same corrupt murderous gangster regime that triggered a revolution against it would eventually stabilise Syria - did they think he’d suddenly stop stealing food from the mouths of his people? 

Assad forcibly displaced 3 million people into Idlib and the world just moved on. Now those people are taking back their homes, in spite of their abandonment, and the foreign policy establishment is concerned again. Now the conflict is no longer in the hands of the western powers. That ship has sailed. These are the consequences of their failures. If the regime falls, it will be despite their attempts to keep it on life support, and by the hands of Syrians that owe NOTHING to the USA.This is what the world looks like without your involvement. Deal with it.

Meanwhile in Syria

Fighting continues around Hama, with the rebels attempting to surround the town rather than directly assault it,

Background to the rapid fall of Aleppo to the rebels. And more here, emphasizing the years of careful organizing and planning. 

Troops from the Syrian army's 25th Division, supposed to be one of their tougher units, just surrendered a base full of tanks and other gear with hardly a fight. People are starting to wonder if much of the army has effectively gone over to the other side.

Mass surrender of regime troops at al Safira. And the rebels call on the rest of the government army to surrender, saying the battle is already over.

Among the hundreds of military vehicles the rebels have captured are multiple Smerch rocket launchers with a range of 120 km, which means all of Russia's air and naval bases in Syria are within rebel range. Assuming they can find someone who can operate them, but I suspect Ukraine would be happy to lend them a couple of techs. And we do know that Ukraine has ties of some kind with the rebels, since Kyiv sometimes reports on battlefield events before anybody else. In related news, all the Russian warships have left port in Syria for "exercises."

Learning from the old US playbook, Kurdish forces announce they are advancing into regime-controlled territory to fight terrorism.

And Now in Syria, US Involvement

Osint guys on Twitter/X (and here) are reporting US air attacks on Iran-supported Iraqi militiamen in Syria:

Over 50 Iranian-Backed Militants were killed, and at least a dozen Military Trucks and Technicals were destroyed yesterday in the Deir ez-Zor Governorate of Eastern Syria, after a Convoy entering from Iraq was targeted by several A-10 “Warthog” Close-Air Support Attack Aircraft of the U.S. Air Force. In addition, several Iranian Sites near the Town of al-Mayadin were also targeted by Coalition Aircraft, resulting in the destruction of a Command Center and Barracks. These Strikes were likely carried out in support of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) [Kurds], who have begun to advanced into Assad Regime and Iranian-Backed Territory along the Euphrates River; in preparation for a possible Large-Scale Offensive in Eastern Syria, similar to the one ongoing now in the West of the Country.

But I can't find any official US statement about this. Not that this is really anything new; if you do a quick search for "US air attack Syria" you will see that we launch one every month or so, in response to the regular drone attacks on our troops there: November 12, October 30, September 29, etc.

Some US military types are laughing, saying that since those militias attack US forces all the time, when the Air Foce saw that column strung out along a road they just yelled "yee-ha" and dove in.

So I can't tell if this is just the same-old same-old, or if it really is a US attempt to aid this rebel offensive. Any reinforcements moving from Iraq to Damascus would have to cross areas of eastern Syria where the US and our Kurdish allies are active, so this might be a statement that large-scale movement of Iranian-backed forces into Syria will not be ignored.

But what a bizarre place Syria is, with American and Russian troops both present, trying to help their respective clients without fighting each other, so many active armed groups that you need a glossary to keep all the acronyms straight, a government everyone despises that stays in power only because of foreign support and the fact that some Syrians fear the opposition even more.

*     *     *

The Institute for the Study of War has started issuing regular updates on this fighting.

Some links on Twitter/X:

Summary of recent fighting.

Staggering material losses of the Syrian government army.

Very interesting Russian post on how messed up the Syrian government is.

And meanwhile the Russian air forces responds to the rebel advance according to their own traditions, by bombing hospitals.

David Brooks on MAGA Values

David Brooks in the NY Times:

It’s not sufficient to say that Trump is leading a band of morally challenged people to power. It’s that Trumpism represents an alternative value system. The people I regard as upright and admirable MAGA regards as morally disgraceful, and the people I regard as corrupt and selfish MAGA regards as heroic.

The crucial distinction is that some of us have an institutional mind-set while the MAGA mind-set is anti-institutional.

In the former view, we are born into a world of institutions — families, schools, professions, the structures of our government. We are formed by these institutions. People develop good character as they live up to the standards of excellence passed down in their institutions — by displaying the civic virtues required by our Constitution, by living up to what it means to be a good teacher or nurse or, if they are Christians, by imitating the self-emptying love of Christ. . . . We know our institutions have flaws and need reform, but we regard them as fundamentally legitimate.

MAGA morality is likely to regard people like me as lemmings. We climbed our way up through the meritocracy by shape shifting ourselves into whatever teachers, bosses and the system wanted us to be. Worse, we serve and preserve systems that are fundamentally corrupt and illegitimate — the financial institutions that created the financial crisis, the health authorities who closed schools during Covid, the mainstream media and federal bureaucracy that has led the nation to ruin.

What does heroism look like according the MAGA morality? It looks like the sort of people whom Trump has picked to be in his cabinet. The virtuous man in this morality is self-assertive, combative, transgressive and vengeful. He’s not afraid to break the rules and come to his own conclusions. He has contempt for institutions and is happy to be a battering force to bring them down. He is unbothered by elite scorn but, in fact, revels in it and goes out of his way to generate it.

In this mind-set, if the establishment regards you as a sleazeball, you must be doing something right. If the legal system indicts you, you must be a virtuous man.

In this worldview, a nominee enshrouded in scandal is more trustworthy than a person who has lived an honest life. The scandal-shrouded nominee is cast out from polite society. He’s not going to run to a New York publisher and write a tell-all memoir bashing the administration in which he served. Such a person is not going to care if he is scorned by the civil servants in the agency he has been hired to dismantle. . . .

The corrupt person owes total fealty to Donald Trump. There is no other realm in which he can achieve power and success except within the MAGA universe. Autocrats have often preferred to surround themselves with corrupt people because such people are easier to control and, if necessary, destroy.

In other words, MAGA represents a fundamental challenge not only to conventional politics but also to conventional morality. In his own Substack essay, Damon Linker gets to the point: “Trumpism is seeking to advance a revolutionary transvaluation of values by inverting the morality that undergirds both traditional conservatism and liberal institutionalism. In this inversion, norms and rules that counsel and enforce propriety, restraint and deference to institutional authority become vices, while flouting them become virtues.”

I would note the connection of this “values system” to a belief that something is terribly wrong with the world. The system has to be smashed because everything is going to hell. Why?

Really, why? So far as I can see, the world is better for most people than it has ever been, and it continues to get better. Why the rage, that insistence on blowing everything up? It isn't just MAGA people, it's anarchists and communists and cultural leftists who think that everything has to be decolonized. You no doubt remember all the people who supported Bernie but then switched to Trump; they said that the world needs a dramatic shake-up, and they don't much care who does it so long as it gets done.

I remember a conversation I had with my sons a few years ago, when they were really down on America. I said, if you think our country is collapsing, you should go to Venezuela and see what that really looks like.

Syrian Civil War, 1 December

The big news is that government forces regrouped and retook Hama from the rebels. The rebels had only a small force in the town and withdrew without serious fighting when government forces approached, so it was not much of a battle, but this shows that Assad regime forces have recovered some of their organization and nerve. The rebels have continued to advance in other areas but nothing like the blitzkrieg of the previous few days.

HTS, the Turkish-backed, Sunni Muslim group leading the offensive, has seized land from Kurdish groups and its soldiers have looted Kurdish homes. Doesn't bode well for unity among anti-regime forces. More here.

A claim about captured equipment: "The amount of captured Assad regime weapons, ammunition, tanks, IFVs, and trucks is sufficient to rearm an entire rebel army." More pictures here from Special Kherson Cat, one of the most reliable Ukrainian bloggers. The captured stuff includes a couple of aircraft, a helicopter, and Pantsir SAM systems.

Russia has sacked the commander of their forces in Syria and replaced him with one of their top generals. Ukrainian intelligence reports that Russian forces in Syria have taken serious losses, but nobody else has confirmed this. Putin promised aid to Syria but nobody has yet reported on Russian forces or equipment arriving.

As I was saying about the anti-Assad, anti-Putin community, who believe all the evil in the world is run from Moscow: 

What’s happening in Ukraine, Georgia, Syria all shows we need a global plan to counter Russia and its “allies.”

More on the political background from Ruth Sherlock, notes that in recent weeks Israel has been bombing Iran-backed militias in Syria.

And this, from Oz Katerji: 

Nobody knows what will happen tomorrow and anybody who says so is lying. The truth is nobody, not even the most analytical minds with the best contacts, foresaw any of this, and the experts are sitting around as dumbfounded as you are, hitting refresh on their Telegram feeds just like you are. There are two types of Syria analyst right now, the type saying “man I have no idea what’s going on”, and liars. You aren’t going to find any answers.

The Logic of Land Acknowledgements

Thijs Niks on Twitter/X:

Once the logic of land acknowledgements and "decolonisation" is followed, it leads very quickly to some very dark futures. Assigning each person a homeland based on their ethnic ancestry, and then declaring that that homeland is the only place they or their descendants can ever truly belong, would not be an act of justice, it would be a global nightmare made real, surpassing even the horrors of previous centuries.

The Syrian Civil War Re-Ignites

I had thought that the Syrian civil war was pretty much over, a frozen conflict that left the Assad government ruling most of the country. But suddenly that has changed, as rebel forces have retaken most of Aleppo and the surrounding district in what it is fair to call a "lightning campaign." There are videos online of rebels seizing  Aleppo police headquarters, dancing in the main square, and occupying a notorious prison, releasing all the prisoners. (More videos here, here, here.) To summarize,

It took the Assad regime 4+ years to conquer Aleppo, with the assistance of Iranian, Iraqi and Lebanese Shia militias, and Russian aerial domination. If this offensive continues at this pace, Assad could well lose Aleppo in 4 days.

Actually it only took three days.

As to how much farther they might go,

If you want to know where we are right now, nearly all the Syria analysts I know are trying to remain conservative on how far they think this offensive will go, because they're in a state of disbelief at how quickly regime lines are collapsing.

The context for this advance has to be that all the groups that aided the Assad regime before are now crippled (Hezbollah) or distracted (Russia, Iran). Russia withdrew most of its aircraft and air defense assets last year, along with all its regular army infantry. Russia's remaining airplanes have been active but their base is under drone attack and they don't seem to have had much impact; online Russian sources are worried about the rebels taking their naval base at Tartus.

Various people on Twitter/X, notably British/Lebanese journalist Oj Kateri, say that this offensive had been planned for quite a while:

Preparations for the battle began two years ago when Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham began raiding along the front lines. Then all the factions formed training camps where serious preparations were made. Military manufacturing developed to the level of drones with a range of at least 120 km, based on those used in the Ukrainian war, and the factions calmed down their differences and Tahrir al-Sham, as the largest and most organized faction, sought to accommodate everyone.

One of the discoveries I made when I began following the Ukraine war on Twitter/X is that there is a loose online alliance of people worldwide who believe they stand for freedom against tyranny. They seem to have formed around the Syrian civil war. Their enemies are the Assad regime and those who supported it: Iran, Russia, Venezuela, Hezbollah, Hamas. So they see those fighting against that Axis of Evil as their allies: the Syrian rebels, Ukraine, Israel. They cheered the destruction of Hamas and Hezbollah and root for the fall of Russia and Iran; their bitterest insults were launched at Obama for declining to intervene in the Syrian war. This new Syrian rebel offensive has them cheering again, and posting like mad. Here is an example of their thinking:

The Syrian Civil War, which began in 2011, played a pivotal role in shaping modern Russian foreign policy and military doctrine, marking the resurgence of Russia as a global power in conflict zones. For Russia, Syria was a testing ground for new strategies and military technologies, such as precision airstrikes, electronic warfare, and the integration of hybrid warfare tactics. Moscow’s intervention, which officially began in 2015, was framed as a response to the perceived instability caused by Western involvement in the Middle East, particularly U.S. and NATO actions. The war allowed Russia to assert itself as a key player in the region, bolstering its influence in the Middle East and challenging the U.S.-led order. Through its support for the Assad regime, Russia not only preserved a strategic ally but also demonstrated its ability to project military power far from its borders. This marked the beginning of a more assertive Russian doctrine, focusing on exploiting regional conflicts to reassert influence, undermine Western alliances, and promote its vision of a multipolar world order. . . .

Following its intervention in Syria, Russia's military and diplomatic strategies expanded to other conflict zones, notably Libya and Ukraine, further solidifying its doctrine of using hybrid warfare and military influence to assert power on the global stage. In Libya, Russia has supported General Khalifa Haftar's Libyan National Army in a bid to challenge the UN-backed Government of National Unity, using mercenaries, arms shipments, and covert support. . . . 

Russia's ongoing support for separatist movements in Eastern Ukraine, along with its full-scale invasion in 2022, demonstrated its commitment to challenging the post-Cold War European security order and reasserting its influence over former Soviet states. . . . These interventions across multiple fronts have reinforced Russia's doctrine of employing military force, proxy wars, and strategic alliances to assert its dominance and challenge the West's global influence, marking a significant shift in its foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Thus, what is happening today in Syria with the rebels taking over large areas of land is directly undermining Russia’s future plans in the Middle East.

I am not sure what to make of this. On one level one has to agree with US representative Joe Wilson (Rep-SC):

Millions of Syrians have suffered unthinkable atrocities under a regime that survived only because of war criminal Putin and terrorist Khamenei. They do not want to be refugees, they want their homes and communities that butcher Assad has stolen. May God be with them.

But on the other, the Syrian opposition includes a dozen different armed groups with very different agendas, including the remnants of ISIS and Kurds who want to leave the country altogether. When a similar coalition overthrew the Gaddafi regime in Libya, the results were not pretty.

At the moment I do not think this offensive is a serious threat to the Assad regime; the rebels seem to have astonished themselves just by taking the closest city, and it's a long way to Damascus. I am interested to see where the lines stabilize, and to see what sort of government is set up in Aleppo.

But it may turn out that October 7 has reshaped regional politics in very big and far-reaching ways.

UPDATE 1

The rebel offensive is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). HTS was once an arm of al Qaeda but turned against them, allied with Turkey, and defeated ISIS and another al Qaeda faction in tough battles. Here's a 2021 article on the group. From the abstract:

In pursuit of local dominance and ultimately survival, HTS has broken one jihadi taboo after another, including turning against al-Qa`ida and the Islamic State and dealing crippling defeats to both in Syria’s northwest. The implications and consequences of these developments are manifold. On the one hand, not only does HTS no longer represent the international terrorism threat that its predecessor once had, it has also almost entirely squashed the global threat posed by its more extreme rivals and played a role in maintaining the longest ceasefire in a decade of war in Syria. On the other hand, however, HTS’ de facto rule of northwestern Syria threatens to ‘mainstream’ a local jihadi model that looks set to experience a substantial boost by the Taliban’s surge to power in Afghanistan. Should conditions dramatically change, it could also come to represent a strategically significant terrorist safe haven once again—on Europe’s doorstep.

Statement from HTS here saying they don't really want to fight Russia, just overthrow Assad. 

UPDATE 8 PM EST

Reports that the Syrian government and its forces have abandoned  Aleppo and withdrawn to al Safrah 10 miles to the southeast.

UPDATE 8 AM EST

The statue of Bassel el-Assad, the dictator's brother, is toppled in Aleppo.

Revolt has broken out in Daraa in Syria's southwest, at the other end of the country from Aleppo. Seems disorganized and chaotic for now; observers are waiting to see if former rebels who accepted Assad's rule back in 2018 will join this revolt. Defense analyst Michael Horowitz says, "In southern Syria, a low-level insurgency never disappeared, and could escalate."

Online sources say the rebels have taken Maarat, 50 miles southwest of Aleppo, another place that was fought over for years but now may have changed hands in hours. Here is the announcement from the rebels. And several smaller places in this area.

Shashank Joshi of the Economist has more on HTS, drawn from this article.

Russian sources (Rybar, Rusich) are scathing about the Syrian army, calling them cowards, etc. They say this about the fighting:

Everyone noted the sudden panic that overtook the Syrian army, so there may be something to this. If so, all well-organized armies attacking less effective forces should take note and make good use of social media to create and spread panic.

On the subject on possible dissension among the rebels, this:

While we are ultimately happy to see Assad go, we also don't want Jolani's radicalism, or any faction that does not look out for the rights of Syrians. The real test is now; no revenge, no corruption, no religious ideologies being imposed overs others. Our mandate is freedom.

The same source says Erdogan is not Syria's friend and his power must be resisted.

UPDATE Noon EST

You can follow the fighting at the Live Syria Map.

Additional places said to have fallen to the rebels: Hama and the nearby air base, Halfaya, Aleppo International Airport.

Rebels claim to have shot down a Russian or Syrian jet over Aleppo. They were earlier seen posing with recently captured MANPADS systems.

Reports that Syrian officers have started evacuating their families from Homs to Damascus.

The Syrians abandoned lots of valuable equipment like tanks and air defense systems along their retreat routes, apparently because they ran out of gas. It's a sign of complete panic when soldiers flee without first gassing up their vehicles.

Video of crowds celebrating the liberation of Hama.

A Tale of Two Treasures

Two successive posts on The History Blog point out the importance of antiquities law.

First, Ritually bent sword from Bronze Age/Iron Age transition found in Denmark. The sword is above.

Ritual deposits including a ritually bent sword have been discovered in a bog near Veksø northwest of Copenhagen, Denmark. The small cache of objects date to the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age, around 500 B.C., and the sword actually incarnates the transition, being made of bronze with iron rivets.

They were discovered by Claus Falsby on his first outing with a metal detector. He contacted museum organization ROMU which manages archaeological responsibilities for central and western Zealand. ROMU archaeologists immediately went to the site and excavated it, discovering additional objects. In total, the cache now consisted of the bronze sword with iron rivets in the handle sinuously bent into a s-curve, two small bronze axes (known as celts), two or three large ankle bangles called vulrings, a fragment of a large fibula and an object of unknown purpose.

Close-up of the black showing the herringbone pattern created in the forging process; the folding was done to get the right mix of iron and carbon in the steel.

Second, Nationally important Bronze Age hoard recovered from looters:

A late Bronze Age (ca. 950–780/740 B.C.) hoard of national importance found near Gryfino in Poland’s West Pomeranian Voivodeship has been rescued by authorities after it was illegally excavated. Anonymous individuals sent pictures of the objects to each other before they were emailed to the Provincial Conservator of Monuments in Szczecin who then called the police.  . . .

The hoard contains more than 100 objects, 73 of them remarkably large. It includes more than 30 bronze neck rings, weapons, shield bosses, jewelry, phalerae (metal discs) from horse harnesses, silver spikes, the handle of a vessel, sickles and spearheads. Three of the objects are of national importance, unique on the archaeological record of Poland: a brooch made of circular hoops with decorated sheet-metal domes, a long pin and the axe which were not locally made and came to Gryfino from southcentral Europe, probably the Alpine region. The axe socket contains remnants of wood from the haft, which will give archaeologists the opportunity to radiocarbon date the axe head and determine what kind of wood it was mounted to.

The finder or finders used a metal detector but Polish law regulates their use to prevent exactly this kind of shenanigan, and the looters obviously did not have the necessary permits to conduct a metal detector search. That in itself is an indictable offense, but to add insult to injury, it’s clear from the photographs that they destroyed at least one clay container in which the treasure had been buried 3,000 or so years ago and ran roughshod over the archaeological context, acts punishably by a term of up to eight years in prison.

What is the difference between the collegial enterprise described for Denmark and the illegal "shenanigans" in Poland? National law.

In Denmark, Britain and Norway (at least) the authorities work with metal detectorists and property owners and reward them for bringing their finds to the government's attention. In Italy, and, it seems from this article, Poland, the authorities ban amateur archaeology and prosecute the people who do it. As a result, the things they find simply disappear, unless they are foolish enough to brag on Facebook about it.

Links 29 November 2024

Hercules and Cerberus, attributed to Andokides, 6th c. BC

The remains of historian Marc Bloch, who was executed by the Gestapo in 1944, will be interred in the French Pantheon. Macron called him "a man of the Enlightenment in the Army of Shadows."

Excellent Scott Siskind piece looking into whether longer prison sentences reduce crime. His conclusion is that they do, but probably not as much as spending the same amount of money in other ways, such as on more police or more court resources so we could try more people.

The seclusion of women in Muslim-ruled India, as shown in architecture, and the possible impacts of that history in the present day.

The web site of British painter Jadé Fadojutimi, who has just broken into the top ranks with multiple million-dollar sales. Pretty colors, anyway.

How bad are economic statistics in the developing world? Very bad. Via Marginal Revolution.

The Smithfield meat market in London is closing. (NY Times, BBC,  Guardian) The current building dates to 1868, but there has been a market on the site since at least 1174. The city government of London began operating the market in 1327. Online sources, including the market web site, say the grant to the city was made by Edward III. But Edware III was a boy in 1327, so the grant was really made by his mother Queen Isabella (aka the Shewolf) and her lover Roger Mortimer, one of several actions they took to insure the loyalty of the city of London to their regime. 

This week Ezra Klein interviewed some people upset about government mismanagement, effectively blaming government dysfunction for the poor performance of Democrats. As Kevin Drum explains here, this ignores the fact that bureaucrats mainly do annoying things because legislators have ordered them to. Klein and his colleagues also lump together problem projects with others that are working very well, which is just dumb because it keeps us from looking at the successful projects to see what they are doing right.

Machiavelli and the rise of the private study in the Renaissance. The early modern world, say 1400 to 1800, saw a huge change in how domestic space was organized, with a rise of private rooms for sleeping, reading, etc. for all who could afford them. One of the early signs of this change was bookish aristocrats installing privates rooms for reading and contemplation.

Whalefall, 12-minute video.

Depressing NY Times article arguing that highly drug-resistant strains of bacteria and fungi are arising and spreading partly because they infect war wounds, especially in places like Iraq or Libya where the wounded don't get the best care.

Richard Hanania: "Really weird how Democrats were able to steal the election when Trump was president but not when Biden was."

In this 2018 Harpers article, T.M. Luhrmann notes that thousands of people hear voices despite having none of the other symptoms of psychosis. Is this the same phenomenon that schizophrenics experience, or something very different? Also some material on the "Hearing Voices" movement.

Meanwhile, in the Philippines: "Philippine security agencies stepped up safety protocols on Saturday after Vice President Sara Duterte said she would have President Ferdinand Marcos Jr assassinated if she herself were killed." We're in Dark Star Trek territory: "I remind you that if I am killed, my operatives will avenge me, and some of them are Vulcans."

Excellent black and white landscape photography by Gary Wagner. Lots more at his web site.

Kevin Drum checks the data and finds that since 1976 the percentage of Americans saying they feel financially satisfied or dissatisfied has changed very little despite huge economic growth.

Aztec skull whistles, relatively common artifacts around temples and other sacred spaces, sound like people screaming.

Sabine Hossenfelder looks into claims that AI systems (like the protein-folding system AlphaFold) will render quantum computing useless for many purposes. Very interesting 7-minute video arguing that the tricks making this possible may have wide ramifications.

Most biologists think that bacteria and archaea have a common ancestor, since they share so many biochemical systems. A recent genetic study says the most likely date for that Last Universal Common Ancestor is around 4.2 billion years ago. That does not leave a lot of time for the evolution of DNA, RNA, ribosomes, and all the other stuff that life on earth shares, since the first evidence of liquid water on the planet only goes back to 4.4 bya. It is evidence like this, pushing the origins of life ever closer to the first livable days on our planet, that has driven some to speculate that life must have arrived on earth from somewhere else.

Paper arguing that South Asians achieve more leadership positions in the US than East Asians because South Asians are "more assertive." The authors weirdly do not address the question of caste, since it is overwhelmingly high-caste South Asians who get those leadership slots and we have enormous worldwide evidence that people raised to think they belong to a special, elite group are more assertive than anyone else. Via Marginal Revolution.

Fascinating exchange on Twitter/X about reforming the NIH. E.g., if the complaint is that the NIH funds too much fraudulent research, then one response would be for the NIH to set up a new office to audit the work it funds. But, everyone also complains that the NIH already already has too much cumbersome oversight and should step back and let researchers get on with their research. "These grievances bounce back and forth between the NIH being too permissive with its funds and not being permissive enough."

Lots of countries around the world have imposed tariffs on China's tech exports. India has a 125% tariff on Chinese cars.

Archaic hunter-gatherers in Belize constructed big networks of canals and weirs in wetland areas to catch fish. The first canals date back at least 6,000 years, and the system remained in use into Maya times. (Original paper, news story)

Plymouth colony was founded as a commune, with all farming done collectively and all food shared equally. After they nearly starved, governor William Bradford ended that experiment and switched to each family raising and keeping its own grain. Alex Tabarrok explains.

British philosopher Derek Parfit was a very strange man. How strange can you be before that starts to impact the quality of your intellectual work?

An essay noting that, "decolonisation talk has become more and more attenuated from the historical events of decolonisation."

The Room Where it Happens: "There must be another room, somewhere down the hall, where the real meeting is happening, where the real experts are, making the real decisions ... because it can’t just be us. It can’t just be this." – Jake Sullivan, 2013, when he was Chief of Staff to the US Secretary of State.

Diamond is the Hardest Metal

A classic exchange on 4chan for your Thanksgiving amusement, still anonymous:

Anonymous1: What makes Diamond the hardest metal?

Anonymous2: The fact that it's not a metal.

Anonymous3:

Due to extensive research done by the University of Pittsburgh, diamond has been confirmed as the hardest metal known to man. The research is as follows. Pocket-protected scientists built a wall of iron and crashed a diamond car into it at 400 miles per hour, and the car was unharmed. Then they built a wall out of diamond and crashed a car made of iron moving at 400 miles per hour into the wall, and the wall came out fine. They then crashed a diamond car made of 400 miles per hour into a wall, and there were no survivors. They crashed 400 miles per hour into a diamond traveling at iron car. Western New York was powerless for hours. They rammed a wall of metal into a 400 miles per hour made of diamond, and the resulting explosion shifted the earth's orbit 400 million miles away from the sun, saving the earth from a meteor the size of a small Washington suburb that was hurling towards mid-western Prussia at 400 billion miles per hour. They shot a diamond made of iron at a car moving at 400 walls per hour, and as a result caused over 9000 wayward airplanes to lose track of their bearings and crash into 9000 buildings in downtown New York. They spun 400 miles at diamond into iron per wall. The results were inconclusive. Finally, they placed 400 diamonds per hour in front of a car made of wall traveling at miles per iron, and the result proved without a doubt that diamonds were the hardest metal of all time, if not just the hardest metal known to man.

No Judgment was Used

Just stumbled across this:

We built our government to have a lot of surface area for objection from those outside it, for obvious reasons. If you believe someone is going to object to the decisions you make, you try not to make them. A culture emerges in which the goal is to have decisions be the outcomes of processes, not people. You want to be able to defend any decision from criticism by demonstrating strict adherence to a process in which no judgment can be questioned because no judgment was used.

The passage appears to come from a book by Jennifer Pahlka called Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.

Pahlka is very astute. This is exactly how the regulations I work under are supposed to work, notably NEPA and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. These regulations do not specify outcomes, they only lay out who has to be consulted and what information has to be considered. (Also, that more than one alternative has to be considered, including the option of doing nothing.) In a typical Section 106 consultation process there will be "consulting parties," some of whom are legally obligated to participate (federal and state agencies), some of whom have a legal right to participate (Indian tribes, certain local governments), and some of whom have just asked to participate (local historical associations, preservation groups, self-proclaimed representatives of ethnic groups). Those last are usually allowed a seat at the table because 1) letting them have their say smooths acceptance of the final result, and 2) if they are unreasonable you can just ignore them. 

So a lot of time and money is spent holding meetings and producing reports and briefings for the consulting parties.

The thing is, regardless of what anybody says in the meetings, the lead federal agency has the absolute right to do whatever they want. I have seen cases in which they just say "forget all of you" and go ahead. I have in fact urged this course on my clients from time to time, although generally without success, because the agency leads almost always try to reach consensus in the meetings. This makes everyone's lives nicer, and they can feel better about what they are doing. But also, as Pahlka says, because the real decision makers like to hide their power behind the process. That is how the best and most effective bureaucrats operate, guiding things toward the outcome they want without making anyone mad or drawing attention to their own ambition.

But what I would ask is, what would be better? Just going ahead with every idea anyone ever came up with for a new road or what have you? 

I have seen cases in which bad ideas were halted by this process. Every instructor who teaches people how this stuff works has a long roster of projects that went badly because the process was not taken seriously, in particular the requirement to weigh different alternatives. I have also seen cases in which political decision-makers used the process to overcome objections from the public to a development they wanted; NEPA and Section 106 give them a way to fire back at people who claim (someone always does) that this project would destroy uniquely important environmental or historic resources.

I get it that the process is expensive and time-consuming. But one of the most corrosive problems in our world is that millions of people think big changes happen without their having any say, or any chance to voice their objections. These laws give them that chance, as do all other laws requiring public hearings before actions are taken. 

If it were up to me I would make a lot of changes to this process, since in some ways I think it has gotten absurd. But I would not abolish it, because in a democracy we really should let the people have a chance to speak.

Science and Politics in the US

Not that anyone should read too much meaning into Donald Trump's slapdash appointment process, but I agree with M. Anthony Mills (NY Times) that one theme is a rejection of science:

The leader of the Republican Party and our country’s next president has tapped a pro-choice scion of the country’s most famous Democratic dynasty to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. In keeping with the bewildering dynamics of today’s negative partisanship, conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation have cheered the selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while liberals have near categorically denounced him.

Mr. Kennedy’s transformation from left-wing vaccine skeptic to potential Republican cabinet member overseeing America’s vast health apparatus represents a profound shift not only in the character of the American right but also in the politics of science more generally. The emergent MAGA science policy agenda, driven by skepticism and anti-elitism, blends familiar conservative and libertarian ideas with a suspicion of expert power once more associated with the left. The result is a uniquely American brand of populism that has the potential to fundamentally reshape national politics.

Back in 1970 Republicans were much more pro-science than Democrats, and the hippie, whole earth, split wood not atoms, make love not bombs thing was launched mainly from the left. Now things have largely switched, and that strikes me as quite important.

Why did this happen? 

Fights over teaching evolution in the schools.

Fights over climate change. You will never understand America until you grasp the intense devotion of many men to their gasoline-powered machines, and more broadly to the old manly economy of mining, logging, and making things in fire-filled factories.

Environmentalism more generally; some of you probably would not believe me if I explained to you the arcana of wetlands law, bat preservation, and other regulations that genuinely hamstring building in this country. 

Covid-19. As all my readers know, I do not forgive the tergivisations of government pandemic policy – e.g., saying that masking is ineffective, then requiring it, or saying that closing schools was not needed and then closing them – or the attitude of leftists toward all of this, e.g. demanding that churches close but insisting that racial injustice is so important that mass protests had to go ahead. 

One could sum all of this up in a more general point, The alliance of science with bureaucrats who tell people what they can and cannot do.

Others:

Health and diet advice more broadly. This one is complex because in many ways medicine has gotten a lot better over the past 25 years, thanks largely to drugs created by Big Pharma and getting doctors to take actual science more seriously. On the other hand that process involved rejecting a lot of what was established medicine 25 years ago, like heart bypass surgery; the weary cry of many science skeptics these days is "they keep changing their minds about everything."

The end of physics. As I regularly post here, I have been convinced by a group of skeptical scientists that sub-atomic physics is at a complete dead end, and astrophysics also seems radically stuck; spending on these things keeps going up and the number of papers published keeps rising, but fundamental progress seems to have halted. Plus there's the phantasm of fusion power, still 15-25 years away. Don't get me started on string theory. None of this inspires confidence in science.

The instututionalization of science. Lots of cutting-edge science used to be done by smart people in tiny labs. Now science is funded at vast expense by huge government agencies and mega-corporations. The scientists themselves are constantly complaining about the process involved in competing for, administering, and accounting for grants, and you don't have to be anti-science to suspect the agendas of the people involved. It strikes me as possible that absolutely nobody understands either the overall nature of this process or its impact on the world, and certainly the average voter has no clue. So if your biggest complaint about the modern world is excess bureaucracy, you're probably going to be suspicious of modern science.

Speaking only for myself here, I understand the frustrations of many people with our science establishment. I would do a lot of wholesale reform if I could, starting by slashing the budgets of sub-atomic physics and manned space flight. I would also radically reform my own field and drastically reduce the number of archaeological sites dubbed "significant."

But we need science. It is the root of everything good about the modern world, and the only possibly solution to many of our problems. We can't survive without it. 

So the turn of a whole political party against the foundation of our world is a bit concerning. Part of me thinks that science is so fundamental that we can't really do much to get rid of it or even change it, but certainly there could be cases where we cast it aside and a lot of people end up dying as a result.