bensozia

Villa Loupian

2012-02-15T14:25:00.001-05:00

A fascinating digital presentation of the Roman-era Villa Loupian in France, with 3-D reconstructions of four different periods of the house and a digital walk-through of the marvelous mosaics. The villa was the home of a wealthy Gallo-Roman aristocrat and the center of a commercial wine-growing operation.

Reconstruction, ca. AD 180.

Plan of the mosaics, used for navigation.

And some screen captures of the mosaic tour.

Nests Not Emptying

2012-02-15T13:05:00.000-05:00

Some numbers from the Financial Times:

The percentage of men ages 25 to 34 living in their parents' home rose from 14 percent in 2005 to 19 percent in 2011.

In the U.S. the proportion of people age 30 to 34 living with their parents has grown by 50 percent since the 1970s, and the recession has only made things worse. In 2010, over 5.5 million young adults moved back home with their parents, a 15 percent increase from 2007.

You see a lot of hand-wringing about this from the people who enjoy fretting about the young people's morals, but the explanation is straightforward: the ratio between the average starting salary and the cost of an apartment has plummeted. I used to rent a cozy apartment in a safe part of Minneapolis for $300 a month, and good luck finding a deal like that anywhere in America now. Not to mention that right now unemployment for 18 to 29-year-olds is 19%.

People with No Memory are Fired Up to Intervene in Syria

2012-02-15T12:48:00.001-05:00

David Rieff at Foreign Policy:

Cryhavoc and let slip the dogs of (humanitarian) war. That, at least, is what muchof the U.S. policy elite seems to be pushing for these days in Syria. That manyof the "permahawks," like Fouad Ajami, Max Boot, and Elliott Abrams, whochampioned the George W. Bush administration's decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein, arenow calling for supporting the uprising against Bashar al-Assad's dictatorshipshould come as no surprise to anyone. Nor should similar calls from most of theliberal writers and editors associated with the New Republic magazine come as a shock. They, too, have beenremarkably consistent, and the magazine's current symposium on what needs to be donenext in Syria is eerily reminiscent of the one it ran the year after theinvasion of Iraq.

Our intervention in Libya took place under what I would consider the best possible scenario: an appealing rebel movement that already controlled much of the country, a wildly unpopular dictator with no foreign friends to speak of, a desert country with few large cities, well suited to air warfare, and (especially) a country with no ethnic troubles. And still the result has so far fallen well short of a human rights triumph.

Intervention in Syria would be much, much harder. Assad's regime has much support, especially from the country's religious minorities (Alwaite, Shi'ite, and Christian), and vastly more firepower than Qaddafi. Also, most Syrians live in large cities and densely populated districts where bombing would be impractical. It would be like Iraq, or worse. And need I remind everyone that as a result of our intervention there, 100,000 to 150,000 Iraqis died? Do the people who supported the invasion feel no remorse about that? Do they not care about the 100,000 Syrians who could easily die if we invade there, or give the rebels the arms they need for a real civil war? Who would take over if Assad falls, and, if the new leaders are from the Sunni majority, what will their policy be toward Alawites, Shi'ites, and Christians?

That serious people want to open this Pandora's box makes me wonder.

The Two Kinds of College Students

2012-02-15T12:27:00.000-05:00

In their famous book Academically Adrift, academics Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa argued that "American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students." The argument is supported by the evidence that we have on the subject, but it must be said that the evidence isn't very good. Nobody has ever tried very hard to figure out how much college students learn. College graduates do better in life in many ways, but this might be because the same personal characteristics that enabled them to finish college -- perseverance, attention span, intelligence, family background, decent mental health -- also help them get ahead in life.

Now Arum and Roksa have dug up some new data on student learning and its effects:

While press coverage of Academically Adrift focused mostly on learning among typical students, the data actually show two distinct populations of undergraduates. Some students, disproportionately from privileged backgrounds, matriculate well prepared for college. They are given challenging work to do and respond by learning a substantial amount in four years.

Other students graduate from mediocre or bad high schools and enroll in less-selective colleges that don't challenge them academically. They learn little. Some graduate anyway, if they're able to manage the bureaucratic necessities of earning a degree. . . .

Now Arum and his colleagues have revealed what happened to those two groups after they left college and entered the unforgiving post-recession economy. Despite a barren job market, only 3.1 percent of students who scored in the top 20 percent of the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which measures critical-thinking skills, were unemployed. . . .

They were also more likely to live away from their parents, and to be married.

Graduates who scored poorly on the CLA, by contrast, are leading very different lives. It's true that business majors, who were singled out for low CLA scores in Academically Adrift, did better than most in finding jobs. But over all, students with poor CLA results are more likely to be living at home with their parents, burdened by credit-card debt, unmarried, and unemployed.

I really don't think college is for everyone.

The Frozen Danube

2012-02-15T07:33:00.000-05:00

We're not having much of a winter in Maryland, but in Europe, the Danube River is frozen, there was ice on the canals of Venice, and children in places like London and Paris are experiencing the joys of sledding and snowman building. In the 20th century the Danube has been open all winter more often than not, but it also froze in 2006, so this isn't all that rare an event.

Life from Mud Pots

2012-02-15T07:20:00.000-05:00

A bit of outdated Victorian science that still lingers in the public discourse is that we know life came from the sea because what flows in our veins is mostly seawater. Not so.

Life as we know it depends very precisely on the movements of electrolytes through our cells -- too much sodium or not enough potassium and our protein machinery stops working. Modern cells are constantly pumping out sodium to keep their balance right, which for most life forms is a nearly equal ratio of sodium and potassium. Seawater has far too much sodium; the best estimate is that the seas of 4 billion years ago had 40 times as much sodium as potassium.

"For cells to synthesize proteins—their molecular machines—they need a lot of potassium. Sodium blocks these activities," said study co-author Armen Mulkidjanian, a biophysicist at the University of Osnabrück in Germany. "Life cannot live without synthesizing proteins, so it must keep potassium high."

Searching for an environment that would provide the right electrolytes for life, Mulkidjanian and his colleagues hit on geothermal springs, like the mud pots of Yellowstone:

"Mud pots are where steam is coming out of the earth and condensing, carrying with it many minerals, including potassium," Mulkidjanian said. "They look like slime coming out of the earth and would make a nice kind of hatchery for the first cells."

Scientists had long ignored mud pots as possible analogs to primordial ooze, because the modern-day versions are swimming in sulfuric acid, a deadly chemical that forms when hydrogen sulfide encounters oxygen in the atmosphere. "People were scared away by the acidic condition, but Earth used to have very little oxygen in its atmosphere," Mulkidjanian said. "These anoxic environments were stable over millions of years and were probably conducive to supporting the first life on Earth."

Show Dog or Line from Howl?

2012-02-14T18:39:00.002-05:00

Michael Sloan has written the greatest literary quiz ever, asking if these things are the names of show dogs or phrases from Allen Ginsberg's Howl:

1.      Casablanca’s Thrilling Seduction
2.      Fireside’s Spontaneous Combustion
3.      Greystone’s Foetid Halls
4.      Caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean Love
5.      Skyline’s Eliminator
6.      Carpe Diem’s Old School
7.      Ancient Heavenly Connection

Many more here.

Peacocks in Indian Art

2012-02-14T12:19:00.000-05:00

Above, "Peacock in a Rainstorm at Night," a leaf from a Deccani manuscript, 16th century.

The Peacock Gate in Jaipur.

A Lady Feeds a Peacock, 18th Century.

Peacock mosaic, 19th century.

Details from Mughal miniatures.

Peacock Kolams (pavement drawings made with colored rice flour) from Tamil Nadu.

A peacock Ragnoli, another type of floor painting.

A 17th-century dish.

Water Meters Coming to Ireland

2012-02-14T08:24:00.000-05:00

In famously damp Ireland, water is free. There are no water meters, and nobody has ever paid a water bill. As a result it is hard to tell how much water people use, but some recent studies have found that the Irish are the only people in the world who use as much municipal water per person as Americans. I find myself wondering how, since hardly anybody in Ireland has either a swimming pool or a gigantic, thirsty lawn. Their bathrooms are like bathrooms in England, not places you want to hang out in.

But however they do it, the Irish are going to have to start paying for it. As part of the new austerity regime, metered water is coming to Ireland, both to raise revenue and to encourage conservation. According to the government, the installation of one million water meters should be complete by 2014.

Some Statistics on the White Working Class

2012-02-14T07:26:00.000-05:00

I've been picking on Charles' Murray's new book about the decline of the white working class, which seems to be very stupid about why his subjects are doing so badly. But at least he understands that there is a real problem here. Some statistics he cites in a Post op-ed titled Five Myths about White People:

Religion:

Since the early 1970s, white America has become more secular overall, but the drop has been much greater in the working classes.As of the 2000s, the General Social Survey indicates, nearly 32 percent of upper-middle-class whites ages 30 to 49 attended church regularly, compared with 17 percent of the white working class in the same age group.

This is an interesting counterpoint to the "clinging to guns and religion" picture of the working class.

Marriage:

The share of upper-middle-class whites ages 30 to 49 who are married has been steady since 1984, hovering around 84 percent. During that same period, marriage for working-class whites in the same age group has fallen from 70 percent to 48 percent.

There is a problem with cause and effect here, since it takes two incomes to push most households into the middle class. But the basic picture is correct; in America, poor people are the ones who have trouble staying married.

Work:

In 1968, 97 percent of white males ages 30 to 49 who had at most a high school diploma were in the labor force — meaning they either had a job or were actively seeking work. By March 2008 (before the Great Recession), that number had dropped to 88 percent. That means almost one out of eight white working-class men in the prime of life is not even looking for a job. This is not just an issue of “discouraged workers”; this rate of labor force dropouts rose in the boom years of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s as rapidly as it did in years of recession.

The big problem with Murray's book is that he doesn't understand why this is so; he thinks it is a moral problem, whereas his critics think it is because the pay and job security of working class men has fallen so much that more and more find it not worth the trouble. As a businessman I know likes to say, "I find that the thing that really motivates people is money."

All of these numbers, along with my personal experience, create a picture of an America divided between an orderly middle class and a lower class sinking in chaos. The thing you need to stay above water in America is stability: stable relationships, steady work habits, long-term thinking. Moving frequently is hell on your credit rating, I suppose because lenders find that people who move a lot either can't pay their bills or forget to. Elementary schools find that their worst students are the ones who change schools often, especially during the middle of the year. Along with chaos, either as causes, effects, or both, come drug abuse and mental illness.

The way to turn poor people into middle class people is to give them stable jobs that pay well enough to lift them out of short-term thinking. Nothing else works.

Carnival in Venice

2012-02-13T18:43:00.000-05:00

It's the time of year when people go to Venice to party in these wonderful rented costumes. Some things really can't be ruined, no matter how cliché they become.

A Wave of Cloud

2012-02-13T13:09:00.001-05:00

Helicopter pilot Mike Schaeffer spotted this wave of cloud surging over high rise condos at Panama City Beach, Florida, then grabbed his boss J.R. Hott and went back in the air to get photos.

Nathan Wirth, Slices of Silence

2012-02-13T08:06:00.001-05:00

I love these quiet images of the California beach. Above, Siren, August 2011. Below, The Fisherman, September 2011. More here.

Sharkskin

2012-02-13T08:01:00.002-05:00

Denticules on shark skin, about 100 microns across. New studies show that the roughened surface of shark's skin increases its speed through the water by about 12%.

The Wild Swans at Coole

2012-02-13T07:48:00.000-05:00

THE trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty Swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

--W.B. Yeats

Moon Halo

2012-02-13T07:30:00.000-05:00

By Rafael Schmall, February 2, 2012.

Today's Education News

2012-02-13T06:50:00.001-05:00

In her CPAC speech, Sarah Palin repeatedly mocked the President by referring to him as "Professor Obama."

In America, the People who Depend on the Government Hate it the Most

2012-02-12T21:11:00.001-05:00

From the Times:

Ki Gulbranson owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side and referees youth soccer games. He makes about $39,000 a year and wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government. He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region’s long-serving Democratic congressman.

Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.There is little poverty here in Chisago County, northeast of Minneapolis, where cheap housing for commuters is gradually replacing farmland. But Mr. Gulbranson and many other residents who describe themselves as self-sufficient members of the American middle class and as opponents of government largess are drawing more deeply on that government with each passing year. Dozens of benefits programs provided an average of $6,583 for each man, woman and child in the county in 2009, a 69 percent increase from 2000 after adjusting for inflation. In Chisago, and across the nation, the government now provides almost $1 in benefits for every $4 in other income.

This is the era of political denial, in which people who depend absolutely on the government think that only other people do. I wish I understood what was behind this, but I just don't. I have a feeling that the rhetoric of conservatism is a part of it. People hear constantly about what independence-sucking corrupt moral disasters "government programs" are, and having internalized this view they simply can't accept that they are the ones who depend on those same programs. Matt Taibbi attended a Tea Party rally in Kentucky where he marveled at the number of old people riding electric scooters:

the person sitting next to me leans over and explains. "The scooters are because of Medicare," he whispers helpfully. "They have these commercials down here: 'You won't even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!' Practically everyone in Kentucky has one."

I see nothing wrong with government subsidies to people who need help; I am all for them. And I suppose that if you want to oppose such subsidies and demand lower taxes, that is your right. But it is wrong in a deep way to depend on such subsidies while railing against them. This disconnect is seriously corrupting American politics, leading to fantasy budgeting, soaring deficits, and completely unrealistic expectations on the part of voters. Somebody needs to tell Americans the truth.

Crocodile Tale Rocks

2012-02-12T20:01:00.004-05:00

By Mikel Lastra, from 1x.com.

Romney's Budget Math

2012-02-12T12:43:00.002-05:00

It seems that you can't run for President these days without engaging in some very dodgy math. Reagan and George W. Bush were the worst offenders so far, proposing outlandishly fantastic budget scenarios, but honestly Democrats haven't been very rigorous, either. Mitt Romney is setting a high bar for this year's contenders by promising to 1) cut taxes to 17% of GDP; 2) hold spending to 20% of GDP; and 3) balance the budget. Hmmmm. . . . Even holding spending to 20% would be difficult; by comparison, Paul Ryan's budget projects spending of about 22%. And since Romney has promised not to cut a penny from defense spending, that would require cutting all non-defense spending by 34%, including Social Security. I find this unlikely. But to balance the budget without cuts like those, we have to raise taxes a lot.

Rick Santorum, Family Values, and the Economy

2012-02-12T12:25:00.000-05:00

According to the Post, Rick Santorum has a "unique message" among this year's Republican contenders:

that the country’s financial problems were inextricably linked to its sagging marriage rates and the number of children born out of wedlock.

As he puts in on his campaign web site, "Healthy families and a strong economy go hand in hand, each reinforcing the other."

Actually Americans have been worrying about this problem for about, oh, 200 years. Worries that Federal welfare programs were contributing to a crisis among poor families go back to the 1960s, and they were a big reason for the bipartisan welfare reform of the 1990s. I think a good bit myself about the part played by marriage, divorce and single parenthood in our culture. But this is certainly a real problem, probably our biggest social problem, and all credit to Santorum for talking about it.

One way Santorum does differ from the rest of the Republican field is that he acknowledges the problem of growing inequality in America:

In this election the American people have an opportunity to restore her greatness and to focus once again on protecting liberty and creating opportunity for all. No longer should it be harder for people to succeed economically than it was for their parents. No longer should upward mobility be better in parts of Europe than in America. We need a renewed focus on creating opportunity, not dividing Americans by class; on creating wealth, not distributing it; and on promoting savings rather than dependency.

But what does Santorum actually propose to do about the problems of poor families? So far as I can find on his web site, his proposals consists of 1) a complete abortion ban, which, if you ask me, would only increase the number of children born out of wedlock; and 2) the standard Republican menu of lower taxes, less spending, and less regulation:

First, I will cut spending by $5 trillion over 5 years, repeal ObamaCare and other onerous regulations and cut non-defense spending to 2008 levels. . . . I will eliminate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s federal housing role, reduce non-defense related federal workers by at least 10 percent and eliminate all energy and most agriculture subsidies.

Second, I will lower personal income and corporate tax rates and dramatically simplify the tax code for families, workers and businesses. To promote marriage, families and the high calling of parenting, I will triple the child deduction and eliminate all marriage tax penalties. The family is the foundation of our country. We need to have an economic policy that supports families and freedom and encourages marriage.

Instead of adding new taxes like President Obama has, I will fight to simplify the tax code by moving from six to two rates and lowering personal income tax rates to 10 percent and 28 percent respectively and eliminating most deductions. This will get us back to Reagan-era pro-growth tax rates. My goal is for the American economy to be growing at least 4 percent to 4.5 percent a year in my first term as president, more than double President Obama’s; by one estimate this would help create 10 million jobs in three years.

In other words, trickle-down economics with a vengeance. And lies — right now income tax rates for most Americans are lower than they were under Reagan, and so far Obama has not raised anybody's. Cutting tax rates for families would help upper middle class people with kids, but half of American households, including all poor families, already pay no income tax. The people we ought to be worried about will get no direct help from this plan, and they would presumably be hurt by cuts in Medicare, housing subsidies, and so on.

I also support two corporate tax rates: 17.5 percent for most businesses — half the current rate — and zero for manufacturers. This will multiply job opportunities for struggling middle-income families and renew communities that have lost critical manufacturing jobs.

Actually many American companies already pay no corporate income tax, and because of the raft of targeted breaks already in place I doubt any manufacturing company pays more than 10%. And if you want simplification, ask yourself how a company that has both manufacturing and non-manufacturing divisions will figure out what its tax rate is.

When it comes to taxes and spending, I used to worry that that these were major problems for our economy, too. Like a lot of Americans who lived through the 1970s, I remember the sense that corporate and government bureaucracies were choking the country, with stagflation and malaise and rage about cheap Japanese cars and all the rest. I used to call myself a moderate, because I thought that maybe cutting regulation and keeping taxes low were essential to making the economy hum.

But now, 30 years later, I think only somebody who ignores reality can think that tax cuts on the rich will somehow automatically help poor people. The economists who told Santorum his massive tax cuts would unleash economic growth are the same ones who said Bush's tax cuts would unleash economic growth. It did not work then and it won't work now. Our economy was much stronger in the 1990s, when tax rates were higher, and in the 1960s, when tax rates were much higher. Ergo, high taxes are not our problem.

Our experiment with free market capitalism over the past 30 years has had the same result as the experiment with free market capitalism between 1890 and 1929: the rich get richer, the super-rich amass astonishing fortunes, and the poor tread water. (And then comes the crash.) Like John Boehner, Santorum seems to long for the 1950s. But the economy of the 1935 to 1980 period was dominated by the government. Inequality in America declined in the years of Big Government, of corporatism, community, bureaucracy and regulation. Since we started rolling back the regulations and unleashing companies to pursue maximum profits, inequality has soared. The life-long, well-paid blue collar job was not a product of free-market capitalism, but of managed oligopoly, government subsidy, strong unions, intense regulation, and exchange rates set by treaty. As David Frum recently wrote,

That society did not spontaneously materialize. People who wanted to live in a world that offered more chances to more people consciously built institutions that extended opportunity and provided security to more Americans than ever before.

The natural state of a manufacturing, trading economy seems to be great instability and great inequality. Only concerted political efforts can make it into something else. Our era of greater equality was created by political action: Social Security, Medicare, subsidies for health care, minimum wages and overtime laws, regulations that limited competition, and so on. As we have moved away from those measures toward freer markets, inequality and instability have increased. Santorum has correctly identified America's biggest social problem but his economic plan will only make it worse.

Greek Gold: Treasures of the Classical World

2012-02-11T09:23:00.000-05:00

We have this false idea that the classical age was a time of restraint and good taste. Actually, of course, Greek and Roman statues and temples were painted bright colors, and everything else was as colorful as people could afford to make it. The best and gaudiest goldsmiths ever were the Greek masters, who were at their height between about 450 and 100 BC.

This was a time of cultural blending, especially after Alexander's conquests, when Macedonian generals ruled from Afghanistan to Nubia. Greek artists looked toward Egypt, the Middle East, the Steppes, and the Etruscans for stylistic motifs. Above, a piece dating to around 200 BC that has inspired a lot of the reproduction jewelry you can buy in museum shops.

Earrings from Attica, 5th Century BC.

Earrings from the 4th Century.

These gold funeral wreaths perhaps indicate what Hellenistic royalty looked like on grand occasions -- not much restraint in evidence here. This is from Armento in southern Italy, dating to the 4th century BC.

A gold Herakles knot, showing the amazingly fine detail ancient goldsmiths could achieve without lenses or artificial light. A diadem from Chiaradonna in southern Italy, 4th century BC.

Armbands from Olbia in the Crimea.

A wreath of golden oak leaves.

An ivy wreath, 4th Century BC.

An amazing array of gold has come from the tombs of the Macedonian royal family. Leaves and flowers seem to have been a specialty of these smiths, as if the height of their art was to make dead gold live.

St. Petersburg 1718, by Jon Baptist Homann

2012-02-11T08:15:00.000-05:00

Full map, above (click to enlarge) and details below.

The Tea Party vs. Agenda 21

2012-02-10T12:30:00.000-05:00

Paranoid American conservatives have been training their sights on a new target, environmentally sensitive land-use planning. The Times:

Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities. They are showing up at planning meetings to denounce bike lanes on public streets and smart meters on home appliances — efforts they equate to a big-government blueprint against individual rights.

How best to use land around cities is a real issue, and I generally applaud people for getting involved in real debates. These folks, though, are being both paranoid and stupid. The paranoid element comes from attributing all attempts to limit sprawl and increase density to the U.N.'s Agenda 21, a non-binding plan for more environmentally sensitive development passed back in 1992. The stupidity is believing that the way the suburbs are now is the result of the free market:

The Agenda 21’ers assume that the status quo mode of urbanization and suburbanization is the exclusive product of markets, individual wealth and democracy, and therefore it is American. Anything not resembling that model, therefore, is un-American, and probably derived from the United Nations, bent as it supposedly is on breaching national sovereignty.

But American suburbs are anything but a land of laissez-faire. The typical suburban building code forbids almost everything, and I mean that literally. By limiting construction to single family homes of certain styles on lots of above a certain size, with landscaped yards, streets of above a minimum width, and so on, they forbid most of the ways people in the world live. In a real free market, we would have many more town houses and apartment buildings, much narrower streets, more mixing of businesses and homes, and much less of the "green space" that surrounds new developments. One Texas councilman told the Atlantic, about his Tea Party protesters,

If they stop to think that what they’re supporting is this very draconian system of regulation … they wouldn’t stand behind it.

Much of the fault here lies not with the public, though, but with the way land-use planning is done in America. Probably no more than one percent of Americans have every attended a local planning board meeting, which is where most of the action takes place. The rules most suburbs have now are a compromise of sorts between the only people who do show up, developers and anti-growth activists. Much of the work is done by professional planners, not elected officials. Planners have a very strong herd mentality, and once a pattern is set it gets adopted everywhere, without the voters being consulted about it. Right now planners are all excited about sustainability and they are constantly throwing around buzzwords and acronyms that really do have the feel of international bureaucracy. In general I think it is good for people to pay attention and not just swallow the latest planning fads. If more people had paid attention to this 40 years ago, we wouldn't have so many sterile suburbs with ridiculously wide streets. Somebody, though, needs to explain to the Tea Party that the "free market" and the "American way of life" are not the same thing, and are often at odds.

The Century of the Intellectuals

2012-02-10T10:04:00.000-05:00

“The twentieth century,” Tony Judt asserts in this luminous book of conversations with the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, “is the century of the intellectuals.” What does it say about intellectuals, then, that the century in which they exercised so much influence on policymaking and public opinion was also the bloodiest in history?

. . . the raucously polemical century began with the obviously malign thinkers on the right such as the antisemitic newspaper editor Edouard Drumant and the fascist Robert Brasillach. These were followed by the idealistic thinkers on the left whose endeavour to make a better world for all of humanity ended in, as Albert Camus wrote, “slave camps under the flag of freedom,” and “massacres justified by philanthropy.”

After two world wars and the Holocaust came an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity in the west—the perfect interlude, you might think, for intellectuals to uphold their oft-asserted ideals of reason and justice. But the cold war seems to have enhanced the capacity of writers, academics, politicians and journalists for terrible ideological choices. Stalinism and the gulag did not lack for apologists in the west. Nor did the unconscionable nuclear build-up at home, and the destructive proxy wars abroad for the sake of the “free world.”

--Pankaj Mishra

Toni Morrison's Family Reunion

2012-02-10T09:39:00.000-05:00

Back in 1973, the New York Times got not-yet-famous novelist Toni Morrison to write them an essay on cooking out for a summer special. It was posted online a while ago, but I just discovered it, and it is wonderful. An excerpt:

Uncle Green was late so that meant all the Blue Gums would be late too. He was up from Alabama for 20 days with a $500 bill which never broke because nobody – nobody – had change and so he had to borrow whatever he needed until the time he could get to a store big enough to handle it. Mama and Aunt Millie looked at his big bill, then at each other, then at the sky that stretched overhead with precisely the infinite patience they had lost.

The fish were already awake, the potatoes were sliced and simmering next to the onions, and this whole tribal effort to have a day-long fish-and-cookout at Turkeyfoot Lake in honor of the eldest member of the Alabama wing of the family was beginning to draw Mama’s and Aunt Millie’s lips together in annoyance. For one thing, the Blue Gums (the Akron group of the family) thought Uncle Green belonged to them more than to us because they were more his age and remembered Alabama the way he did long before the migration North had begun: the first day the general store down home sold light-bread; the farm of 88 acres when it was prosperous and could feed 17 people year round; and other family reunions which were never ever called cook-outs in spite of the fact that they roasted corn and skewered fish over pine-cone fires on days just like this one. . . .

The day moved then into its splendid parts: a ham, fried-potatoes, scrambled-egg, breakfast in the morning air; fried fish and pan-cooked biscuits on the hind side of noon, and by the time Mama – who had never heard of Gerber’s – was grinding a piece of supper ham with her own teeth to slip into the baby’s mouth, and the Blue Gums had unveiled their incredible peach cobbler, the first stars were glittering through the blue light of Turkeyfoot Lake.

Were were all there, All of us, bound by something we could not name. Cooking, honey, cooking under the stars.

A Better Way to Hide a Building Under Renovation

2012-02-09T19:32:00.001-05:00

The Stadskantoor, Rotterdam’s central administrative office, is being extensively renovated. Rather than cover the outside with plastic sheeting, 2012 Architecten put is a wooden facade and covered it with plants. Looks great.

More Van Gogh Drawings

2012-02-09T12:16:00.003-05:00

Nothing exciting yesterday on the art sites I follow, so I post some more of Vincent Van Gogh's wonderful drawings. The Van Gogh Museum has an amazing collection. Above, Marsh, 1881.

Funeral in the Snow near the Old Tower, 1883.

View from Van Gogh's Apartment in the Rue Lepic, Paris, 1887.

Garden with Sunflowers, 1888.

Hill with the Ruins of Montmajour, near Arles 1888.

Wheat Field with Cypresses, 1889.

JFK, Mimi Alford, and the Morality of Leaders

2012-02-09T08:07:00.001-05:00

I have personally never gotten the Kennedy cult -- I guess it's just exciting for some liberals that they once had a really charismatic figure leading their cause. But, for whatever reason, Kennedy looms very large in the American liberal imagination. There is a very moving episode of the X-Files in which a young, idealistic man who wants to believe the best about America learns about the depth of its corruption from Kennedy's assassination, and if there aren't many real people who go that far, I have met quite a few with tendencies in that direction.

Does it matter that JFK was a serial philanderer, drug abuser, and all-around cad? Mimi Alford has come forward with the story of the 18-month affair she had with the President, and all the Kennedy biographers are saying she is completely credible. Kennedy lured her to the White House with the offer of an internship that she didn't even apply for, seduced her on her fourth day on the job, and flew her around the country with him to occupy his free time. The prurient headline so far has been that Kennedy once "urged her to perform a sex act on" his aide Dave Powers while he watched.

I find myself of two minds about all of this. On the one hand I think, what kind of man do you think gets involved in politics anyway? High-testosterone narcissists are surely the most common type of male politician, and they no doubt have affairs at a much higher rate than the general population. Would you prefer closeted gay neat freaks, or religious fanatics? Ambitious empty suits? As I have written before, a quick perusal of history reveals that many of our greatest leaders have closets full of sins.

But is it possible to ignore such behavior by leaders, as I did when I twice voted for Bill Clinton, without somehow endorsing them in a broader sense? If we are willing to send an adulterer to the White House, do we then have any basis for expecting better behavior from anyone, including our own spouses?

I believe that there has been a decline in the sense of shame among middle class Americans and Europeans. We used to engage in ritual shunning of people who broke the social rules, especially young women who "strayed." Once we stopped acting toward such women with awful cruelty, the stigma of unwed pregnancy quickly shrank to near nothing, and now it is routine for single women to have babies. (Which I think is a catastrophe.) The greed of corporate executives and athletes used to be limited by strong social pressure to do the right thing, and those who were too sleazy lost their fans or couldn't get into the right country club. Now we think anyone who doesn't demand the most money he can possibly get is a chump. Does excusing the sinfulness of presidential candidates feed this change?

Or is the public role of presidents so important that it is immoral not to ignore everything else about them? They can declare wars, order assassinations, and have some influence on whether or not thousands of people have jobs; it seems to me that supporting a less able leader because of his personal moral qualities would actually be very wrong.

So I voted for Bill Clinton, and I would have voted for Jonathan Edwards over John McCain if I had had to. But I don't feel great about it.

The Two Problems with Rick Santorum

2012-02-08T19:06:00.001-05:00

1) He's a religious fanatic who thinks birth control should be illegal.
2) To quote Daniel Larison, "According to Santorum, Bush had a foreign policy that was too humble, and he aims to correct that."

The Most Efficient Solar Panel Yet

2012-02-08T11:00:00.000-05:00

Alta Devices, a solar company based in California, just announced that the National Renewable Energy Laboratory had verified its claim that its solar panels had achieved an efficiency of 23.5 percent, meaning that the panels are able to convert 23.5 percent of energy captured from the sun into electrical output. That is nearly twice as efficient as today's top panels.

Which is great, and now we get to find out if they can manufacture these panels at a competitive price. The panels are made of gallium arsenide, which is very expensive, but for their test panels they were able to use sheets of gallium arsenide only 1/40th the thickness of a human hair. That makes the cost of the materials reasonable and also reduces the weight and thickness of the overall panel system. If they can manufacture those ultra-thin sheets cheaply and reliably enough, they could be solar leaders in a few years.

Things Are Looking Up for the President

2012-02-08T07:08:00.005-05:00

Dana Milbank:

Obama suddenly seems to be enjoying himself quite a bit, and no wonder: He just might be the luckiest man alive.

At the last possible moment to save his reelection, the economy is beginning to hum, as evidenced by Friday’s jobs report. And Obama’s Republican opponents are shaping up to be as formidable as, well, marshmallows. While Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are making each other unelectable, the president is singing Al Green, congratulating Super Bowl winners, playing with science projects, raising obscene amounts of campaign cash and watching his poll numbers soar.

According to historical patterns, the high unemployment rate and slow economic growth should combine to doom Obama. But historical patterns do not take into account an opponent who says he enjoys firing people. This week’s Washington Post-ABC News poll showed Obama with a nine-point lead over Romney and a 15-point lead over Gingrich. And political handicapper Charlie Cook wrote Tuesday about a fundamental shift in Obama’s prospects, as the GOP position retreats from “cautiously optimistic” to “uncertainty.”

Santorum may have been the big Republican winner yesterday, but so far this has been Obama's year.

The Vikings Grew Barley in Greenland

2012-02-07T19:21:00.002-05:00

Working in a trash midden at a Viking farm in Greenland, archaeologists have found charred grains of barley. This verifies a statement in a document of ca. 1250, the King's Mirror:

As to whether any sort of grain can grow there, my belief is that the country draws but little profit from that source. And yet there are men among those who are counted the wealthiest and most prominent who have tried to sow grain as an experiment; but the great majority in that country do not know what bread is, having never seen it.

The grains have not yet been radiocarbon dated, but they come from the early decades of the settlement, which lasted from 986 to around 1420 AD.

The excavators think the grains must have been grown in Greenland, since they had not yet been threshed, and anybody carrying grain on a sea voyage would probably not want to have it mixed with chaff.

Viking Greenland was one of the weirder human experiments, and I find it fascinating.

More on Why Poor People are Poor

2012-02-07T18:44:00.000-05:00

Everyone with a mind is piling on the new book by Charles Murray, Coming Apart: the State of White America, 1960-2010. David Frum has already posted two parts of an ongoing and devastating review:

Murray is baffled that a collapse in the pay and conditions of work should have led to a decline in a workforce's commitment to the labor market.

His book wants to lead readers to the conclusion that the white working class has suffered a moral collapse attributable to vaguely hinted at cultural forces. Yet he never specifies what those cultural forces might be, and he presents no evidence at all for a link between those forces and the moral collapse he sees. In an interview with the New York Times, Murray is more specific—but no more precise—in his analysis:
The ’60s were a disaster in terms of social policy. The elites put in place a whole set of reforms which I think fundamentally changed the signals and the incentives facing low-income people and encouraged a variety of trends that soon became self-reinforcing.

The '60s. Of course. But which reforms are the ones that Murray has in mind? He does not say, and I think I can understand why he does not say: because once you spell out the implied case here, it collapses of its own obvious ludicrousness.

Let me try my hand:

You are a white man aged 30 without a college degree. Your grandfather returned from World War II, got a cheap mortgage courtesy of the GI bill, married his sweetheart and went to work in a factory job that paid him something like $50,000 in today's money plus health benefits and pension. Your father started at that same factory in 1972. He was laid off in 1981, and has never had anything like as good a job ever since. He's working now at a big-box store, making $40,000 a year, and waiting for his Medicare to kick in.

Now look at you. Yes, unemployment is high right now. But if you keep pounding the pavements, you'll eventually find a job that pays $28,000 a year. That's not poverty! Yet you seem to waste a lot of time playing video games, watching porn, and sleeping in. You aren't married, and you don't go to church. I blame Frances Fox Piven.

How you can tell a story about the moral decay of the working class with the "work" part left out is hard to fathom.

Brilliant. (Frances Fox Piven was a very liberal Columbia professor who supported a guaranteed income for all Americans and is the frequent subject of Glenn Beck's rants.) Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias tries a different approach, asking whether it matters if the poorest people are poor because of their own mistakes:

If you arrange your society such that 5% of the population is going to occupy some extremely unpleasant social roles, it may well be the case that the specific people who come to occupy those roles do so for specific behavioral reasons that are outside the scope of what we'd commonly call "bad luck." Had those people made different, better life choices they would not be the ones occupying the bottom rungs. But someone else would be. . . . If you examine the suffering people and compare them to others who are doing better in life, you may say "well if only those losers had acted more like the winners they'd be better off." But this doesn't really speak to the justice of the underlying social arrangements. Someone or other is destined to be the "marginal worker" in any labor pool. If everyone had more human capital or a better work ethic then average living standards might be higher, but someone would still be victimized by a bad arrangement of social institutions.

I would add that the psychological impact of unfairness really matters. If poor people believe that some people get rich without working very hard, whereas all they can ever hope for is survival, no matter how hard they work, they will not work very hard. I think that one of the big reasons people are not as into work as they used to be is that the rewards of work, in terms of pay, respect, security, and so are not what they were in the 1950s. One of the things that Frum points out is that in their declining rates of marriage and workforce participation, today's poor are becoming like the poor of the nineteenth century, where a system stacked against the working man bred resentment, radical politics, and thousands of hobos.

It is not helpful to complain about the morals of poor people. There is nothing the government can do about that. But both marriage and workforce participation respond to economic conditions, and maybe the government can do something about the economy.

No Rational Basis for Banning Same-Sex Marriage

2012-02-07T14:22:00.000-05:00

A US Appeals Court has upheld the verdict of federal judge Vaughn Walker that California's Proposition 8, which limited marriage to a man and a woman, violates the constitution's guarantee of equal protection.

The 3-judge panel accepted Judge Walker's reasoning that there was no rational basis for the law. U.S. courts have long held that the government must have a reason for limiting anyone's rights, or for treating different groups of people differently; at minimum, they must be able to show a "rational basis" for denying anyone a right as important as marriage. Judge Walker ruled that the attempts made by the defenders of Proposition 8 to supply a rational basis for the law were not, in fact, rational, but only attempts to rationalize prejudice against homosexuals. The law, he wrote, "fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license."

In California, same sex couples have many other rights -- for example, they are allowed to adopt children -- which this law did not address. It only dealt with marriage. Therefore the courts did not allow any other arguments about the status or acceptance of homosexuality to be discussed, for example, what children are taught about homosexuality in school. Argument focused solely on whether anything was achieved by forbidding gay couples to wed. Since nobody has been able to articulate a good reason for such a ban -- at least, a reason that might not apply to any social change -- Judge Walker and the Appeals Court held that no rational basis for denying this right to gay people had been demonstrated.

I am not generally a fan of achieving social change in the lawcourts, but I find this argument compelling. Many laws on the books are there, not to achieve anything rational, but just to express our disgust or anger or some other emotion. We should sweep them all away and limit ourselves to laws that will actually be enforced, and actually do some good.

I also find it fascinating that in America, a broad range of people do not think that "because we've always done it that way" is a "rational basis" for anything.

The Park Avenue Armory, Restored

2012-02-07T12:02:00.001-05:00

The Park Avenue Armory was built in 1880 to house a National Guard Regiment officered by New York's elite. It was designed by Charles Clinton and decorated by a swathe of elite designers, including Louis Tiffany and Charles White. It is currently being restored by the Park Avenue Armory Conservancy at a cost of $200 million; the Conservancy plans to use the old drill room as an arts venue. These rooms were restored by Herzog & de Meuron.

More on What Really Delays Infrastructure Projects in America

2012-02-07T11:46:00.002-05:00

Matt Yglesias:

At least one reason for the slow pace of transit infrastructure projects in the United States has to be the exceptionally wide range of random objections that people are able to mount to doing just about anything.

Very Unlikely Things Happen All the Time

2012-02-07T11:00:00.004-05:00

On Sunday the NFC team won the opening coin toss at the Super Bowl for the 14th consecutive time. The odds against this are 8,192 to 1. So this qualifies as an event not likely to have happened by chance. In scientific terms, this is a 3.8 sigma result, and if you got one in your experiment you would be rushing to ready your paper for Science.

Most likely, though, this event means nothing. So many things happen every day that even highly unlikely ones show up in the sample. Somebody wins the lottery, even though the odds against anyone doing so are astronomical. I remembering reading an article by a risk assessment expert who said that if at the start of a year we made a list of a million things that had a 1 in a million chance of happening that year, at the end of the year we would ignore the 999,999 that didn't happen and insist that the one that did happen was much more likely than had been claimed. Even in scientific experiments we are generating so many results that very unlikely results happen every day.

Just because something is unlikely to have happened by chance doesn't mean it didn't happen by chance.

Then again, maybe the NFC has rigged the coin.

Two Stories that Epitomize American Culture

2012-02-07T08:59:00.000-05:00

On the front page of this morning's Times are two stories that tell you a lot about American culture.

In the first, President Eisenhower's family objects to the design that has been chosen for his monument in Washington:

The design shows Eisenhower as a youth gazing out at images of his adult accomplishments against a backdrop of the Kansas plains. But the Eisenhower family objects to the design and is attempting to delay approval of the project in a dispute that has pitted a leading American family against one of the country’s most recognized architects. The family says Mr. Gehry should portray Eisenhower as a man in the fullness of his achievements, not as a callow rustic who made good.“He was chief of staff of the Army; he was a two-term president of the United States,” said Susan Eisenhower, a granddaughter. “It’s in those roles that America has gratitude for him, not as being a young boy with a great future in front of him.” The family has asked that the project be delayed until its objections are addressed, and others have joined its cause.“The statue of Ike as a Kansas farmer-boy mocks the president as cornpone in chief, the supreme allied bumpkin,” said the nonprofit National Civic Art Society, which focuses on architecture and urban design.

Gehry says his design was partly inspired by seeing this photograph of Eisenhower (center) with some friends in Abilene in 1904.

The memorial. I noted when I first saw this design that it might be too radical for such a conventional figure, and now American's champions of boring marble monuments are stepping up to prove me right.

The second story features veterans of the Iraq war who are angry about the ticker-tape parade planned for the Super Bowl-winning New York Giants:

The New York Giants on Tuesday will be showered with confetti and greeted by throngs as they are feted with the city’s most storied honor: a parade through its Canyon of Heroes. But all the fanfare — the parade this week is the fourth since 2000 to honor a sports team — has touched off anger and unease among some returned Iraq veterans, who are eagerly awaiting their own recognition. “Everybody recognizes that the Giants deserve a parade,” said Paul Rieckhoff, founder and executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. But, he added, “If a football team gets a parade, shouldn’t our veterans?” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has long expressed his regret that the United States did not do a better job honoring veterans of the Vietnam War in the 1970s, has cited advice from the Pentagon in deciding it was not appropriate to hold a parade while American soldiers are still fighting in Afghanistan.

The worst thing the public discourse in America is that everybody is always getting offended. The Eisenhower monument isn't dignified enough for a president. A parade for football players somehow slights veterans. We are like a nation of noble youths from Shakespeare's Italy, our hands on our (verbal) rapiers, always on the lookout for slights to our honor. What about me, what about my cause, why wasn't I consulted? What about my people, why are we being ignored, why don't we have our own monument and our own holiday and our own museum on the mall? Blah blah blah.

If Eisenhower's family doesn't like this memorial, why don't they raise money and put up one of their own? If veterans in New York want a parade, why are they waiting for the city to stage it for them? Surely if they just announced that they were going to have one, people and businesses would contribute to make it happen. No, we insist that the government recognize us and give us some kind of nod from on high. Otherwise we are going to get offended and take our toys home to sulk.

J.M.W. Turner, St. Augustine's Gate, Canterbury

2012-02-07T06:17:00.000-05:00

Cheap Medicine vs. Expensive Medicine

2012-02-07T05:45:00.002-05:00

How to treat chest pain?

At issue is how to treat about 500,000 Americans who each year develop “stable angina,” which is chest pain that occurs in predictable fashion and is caused by blockages in the heart’s coronary arteries. There are two common treatment approaches. One is angioplasty with stenting, in which a catheter is threaded into the narrowed artery, which is then propped open with a tube made of metal mesh. The other is medication and changes to lifestyle.

In many people’s minds, this issue is settled. The answer came in a $33.5 million clinical trial called COURAGE, whose results were announced five years ago. In that experiment, 2,300 people with stable angina were given “optimal medical therapy” consisting of aspirin, beta blockers and statin drugs, along with help losing weight, quitting smoking and keeping blood pressure under control. Half were also randomly assigned to get angioplasty and stenting. (The varieties of the procedure are known collectively as “percutaneous coronary intervention,” or PCI.)

After nearly five years, the rate of heart attack and death in the two groups was essentially the same: 18.5 percent in those getting only medical therapy and 19 percent in those who also got stents. The only difference between the groups was that people getting stents were slightly more likely to be angina-free (66 percent vs. 58 percent after one year).

Predictably, this study has had very little impact on how cardiologists practice, and most of them perform just as many angioplasties for angina as they did before. To get health care costs down in America, a way has to be found to get doctors to stop doing this sort of thing. Americans who think all such decisions should be made by patients and their doctors need to face the numbers.

Poor Men Need Jobs, Not Lectures about Values

2012-02-06T21:14:00.002-05:00

From the Hamilton Project:

Fewer Americans are married today than at any point in at least 50 years. The causes of this trend and the consequences for Americans’ well-being are naturally the subject of much debate. Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, argues that the decline in marriage, and the concurrent decline in work, is the product of changes in values or social norms that have eroded both industriousness and marital values.This argument ignores well-documented changes in demand that have caused the earnings of many Americans to decline. The decline in marriage is concentrated among these very same Americans. A large body of evidence links the decline in employment and earnings for less-skilled workers to globalization, technological change, and changes in labor market institutions—changes beyond the ability of individuals to control no matter what their values are.

One of the most important reasons we care about marriage is because of the clear association between marriage and poverty: women and children in single-parent households are at particular risk for living in poverty and indeed family earnings for half of the nation’s children have been falling over time. Rather than focusing on changing values, a more effective approach to addressing both poverty and marriage may be to improve economic opportunities for all Americans, particularly for low-skilled, less-educated workers.

Today's Indian Palace: Fatehpur Sikri

2012-02-06T19:50:00.003-05:00

Fatehpur Sikri was built by the third Mugal Emperor, Akbar, near the cave where the Sufi holy man Salim Chisti lived as a hermit. Salim Chisti foretold the birth of Akbar's son, who was named Salim after the saint. This son later became Mughal Emperor under the name Jahangir.

Fatehpur Sikri means "city of victory." Construction began in 1570. This was the first new city built by the Mughals, and it was Akbar's capital for only a decade. The site might have been a good one for a hermit, but it was not a good one for a city, and water shortages and other problems led to the site's decline. It was used occasionally by the Mughals until the early 1700s, but then it was abandoned. It became a ghost town, until it was rediscovered by modern tourists.

Although Akbar was a successful warrior and ruler, he is best remembered as a patron of intellectual and artistic life. He encouraged architecture, painting, and poetry. He embraced the tolerant Sufi attitude toward non-Muslim ideas, and one of his first acts as ruler was to abolish the tax paid by non Muslims. His court included many Hindu grandees.

Akbar liked to stage debates between scholars of the different religions, and especially like to have Jain holy men at court. This led to a cycle of legends concerning Akbar's Nine Wise Men. These stories are set at Fatehpur Sikri, where many of the actual religious debates took place. Above is a near-contemporary painting of Akbar entertaining Jesuits and other scholars at Fatehpur Sikri.

The architecture of Fatehpur Sikri is in the style developed by the Mughals, drawing on disparate parts of their empire: central Asia, Iran, and India.

This is the Jama Masjid or Friday Mosque.

The tomb of Salim Chisti.

The palace came with the ultimate luxury, a board for playing pachisi with humans for the pieces.

This was inspired, like all my Indian Palace posts, by The Royal Palaces of India, by George Michell and Antonio Martinelli (Thames and Hudson 1994).

Tim Knowles, Nightwalks

2012-02-06T14:00:00.002-05:00

According to Tim Knowles' web site, his Nightwalks is

A series of illuminated walks made at night and recorded as long exposure photographs.
The Artist walks away from the camera (mounted on a tripod, shutter open) carrying 3 very powerful torches fitted with diffusers, the lights are connected to a 12 volt battery in a backpack to prolong their life. As he walks the torches illuminate the route, drawing in the landscape. The walks follow paths, ridgeways or compass bearings some for over an hour.

Ron Paul is Remarkably Consistent

2012-02-06T11:46:00.001-05:00

Ron Paul is no Mitt Romney, change as the wind blows flip-flopper. Back in 1961:

As a young doctor in training, dissecting cadavers or practicing surgery on dogs, he would tell all who would listen about how the country was headed down the wrong path, about the urgency of a strict gold standard and about the dangers of allowing government too much power over people’s lives.

Sometimes consistency is a virtue, but other times it is a sign of unhealthy obsession.

The Sudden Onset of the Little Ice Age

2012-02-06T06:12:00.000-05:00

The earth's climate does not change gradually. It lurches from one state to another in sudden, dramatic shifts; this year you're in a warm period, next year a cold one. I think one of the scariest findings of science is the graph above, based on climate proxy data from the Greenland ice core. Look at those dramatic rises and fall -- all the fluctuations of the past 4000 years, which have had dramatic effects on our civilization, are blips compared to the extreme changes that took place around the end of the last Ice Age.

Look farther back and you see the same dramatic shifts when that Ice Age began, around 120,000 years ago. (Like the way the people who made this graph reinforced the height of the curve in the Eemian, the last warm period, by putting a mountain behind it?)

Anyway, a new look at the onset of the Little Ice Age, which lasted from about 1300 to 1850 AD, suggests that it also began suddenly:

It’s long been known that much of the globe became chillier during the Renaissance. By the 17th century, temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere had fallen by half a degree Celsius compared with medieval times. Ice skating on London’s frozen River Thames became popular.

To pin down when this climate change began, Miller’s team traveled to Baffin Island on the northern fringes of Canada. Small glaciers in this region tend to respond quickly to temperature changes. Carbon dating of moss entombed in Baffin’s ice revealed two sudden advances of the snow line that killed off the vegetation: a sudden cold spell between 1275 to 1300, followed by intensifying cold between 1430 and 1455.

Testing whether this chill extended beyond Canada took the researchers to the Langjökull glacier, the second largest ice cap in Iceland. Layered sediments from a nearby lake appeared progressively thicker in the 14th century — exactly what would be expected if the glacier expanded and ground away the landscape.

These chillier conditions began during an especially active time for volcanoes. “The second half of the 13th century had the most volcanism of any period of the past 1,500 years,” says Alan Robock, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

Normally the earth recovers rapidly from episodes of volcano-induced cooling, but these researchers suggest that a series of cooling events in a short time led to such a big expansion of sea ice, which reflects sunlight and cools the earth, that the cooling became self-sustaining. Then again, maybe it was something else. But whatever it was, it happened quickly.

And while I'm producing climate graphs, let me post this one again, which explains why so many scientists are freaked about the climate future. You can see that by and large the temperature and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are closely related. And right now the level of atmospheric CO2 is soaring. The temperature, so far, is not, but if the CO2-temperature relationship holds, we are in for a warming the likes of which the planet has not seen in 10 million years. The last time atmospheric CO2 was as high as it is now, back in the Miocene, global sea level was 50 meters (165 feet) higher than today.

Catching Snowflakes

2012-02-05T21:32:00.001-05:00

Ben tries to enjoy the little bit of snow we got on Saturday.

Religion, Evolution, and the Nonsense that Passes for Thought about them

2012-02-05T20:52:00.000-05:00

Philosopher Chris Campbell takes on one of my least favorite ideas, by attacking some foolish speculation by moralist psychologist Jonathan Haidt:

After being asked how people came together to build cooperative societies beyond kinship, Haidt asserts that “morality” was the key:

A big part of Haidt’s moral narrative is faith. He lays out the case that religion is an evolutionary adaptation for binding people into groups and enabling those units to better compete against other groups. Through faith, humans developed the “psychology of sacredness,” the notion that “some people, objects, days, words, values, and ideas are special, set apart, untouchable, and pure.” If people revere the same sacred objects, he writes, they can trust one another and cooperate toward larger goals. But morality also blinds them to arguments from beyond their group.

If we take ethnohistoric hunter-gatherers for our model of how people formed larger and more cohesive groups in the ancient past, Haidt’s “morality” answer is patently wrong. These groups were held together by kinship ties first and by extended or fictive kinship second. Their “religions” (i.e., shamanisms) weren’t grounded in morals and weren’t much concerned with morals. While such groups had moral norms and ethical rules, these weren’t twined with supernaturalism and had an independent, non-spiritual basis.

Large communities held together by religion-faith-morals are a recent development in human history, no more than a few thousand years old. The kind of community that Haidt describes is a post-Neolithic formation that has its origins in the Axial Age. So does the idea that religion is a matter of “faith.” These are not ancient or evolutionary ideas. Moralizing gods and religions are relative newcomers to the supernatural world.

Haidt’s mistake here is a common one: observe modern or relatively recent cultural formations and then uncritically project them back into the ancestral or evolutionary past. This mistake has other consequences, which are evident in what Haidt calls “innate” or evolutionary moral foundations: “care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.” These “innate” concerns sound suspiciously modern; I suspect at least a few are products of post-Neolithic and Western societies.

I hate this notion that "religion" is an ancient evolutionary construct that arose to bind people together. First of all, "religion" is a modern notion; this category is not recognized by most societies we know about, including China and Japan as recently as AD 1850. Second, as Campbell points out, the religions of hunter-gatherers have very little moral content. (What was the common morality of the Mongol empire?) Third, religion, despite what secular professors like to say about it, is not a social phenomenon, but something that resides primarily within the minds of believers. People believe things because they make them feel better, not because they want to be part of a big group. (Much more on this here.)

I think all of this is modeled on the survival of the Jews and the extraordinary expansion of Islam, and those are very interesting historical events. But they are not more important than, say, the survival of the Kurds or the Han Chinese, or the extraordinary expansion of the British empire.

The Pastrana Tapestries

2012-02-05T12:03:00.000-05:00

These four tapestries were woven in 1475 to 1500 to commemorate conquest of two cities in North Africa, Asilah and Tangier, by King Afonso V of Portugal. The were made in the the Tournai workshops in modern Belgium. They have recently been restored, and are now touring North America. Above, the Siege of Asilah. Nice article on the tapestries here.

Details from the Siege of Asilah.

The Assault on Tangier.

Other Details. The weaving of tapestries was a major art in the Renaissance, in fact down to the nineteenth century, since they were essential for warming up the grim stone rooms of the castles where so many European nobles lived.

Zhu Yufu, China Belongs to Everyone

2012-02-05T07:34:00.001-05:00

The square belongs to everyone.
With your own two feet
It’s time to head to the Square and make your choice.
It’s time, people of China! It’s time.
A song belongs to everyone.
From your own throat
It’s time to voice the song in your heart.
It’s time, people of China! It’s time.
China belongs to everyone.
Of your own will
It’s time to choose what China shall be.

Zhu Yufu, translated by A.E. Clark

In 2007, one year after Chinese activist Zhu Yufu completed a seven-year prison term for “subversion of state power,” he was sentenced to two years in prison for “obstructing official business.” Last March, Chinese officials again detained Zhu, whom they formally arrested and charged the following month with “inciting subversion of state power.” Among the materials prosecutors have cited as evidence in his latest trial is this poem, which Zhu posted on the Internet.

Highway Construction is Delayed by Politics, not Environmental Regulations

2012-02-04T22:01:00.000-05:00

Republicans in Congress are trying to streamline the environmental review process for highway construction projects -- great for them. I doubt there is any bureaucracy in the world that can't be streamlined. But if their goal is to build roads faster, they are looking in the wrong place.

Congressman John Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.), chair of the House highway and transit subcommittee, recently said that “The average federal highway project takes 15 years from concept to completion in the U.S. because of excessive regulations.” If only it were so simple. Every study ever done on why transportation projects gets delayed has found that environmental issues are rarely the holdup. The main holdups are 1) money, and 2) democracy. The number one reason projects are delayed is that legislators don't appropriate the money, and streamlining regulations won't help there. The number two reason is opposition by neighbors. Every major project I have ever worked on has faced organized, concerted opposition from people living nearby. Now sometimes these people are able to use environmental laws to fight projects they don't like, but mainly they work by pressuring elected officials. Faced with a hearing room full of angry voters, legislators and governors and Congressmen often say, "We will study the matter some more," or "We will find ways to make sure the road has absolutely no impact on your quality of life," or some such thing that inevitably leads to delay. The maps highway planners use have symbols for wetlands and forests and aquifers and all sorts of environmental stuff, but the symbol that determines the route the road takes is the capital R meaning "Residence." Roads are almost always routed to require moving the smallest number of voters, prairie dogs and whorled pogonias be damned.

The way to build roads and light rail lines fast is to tell the neighbors to go to hell. This is, for example, how New York's Tappan Zee Bridge was built, by a governor who didn't bother to ask anyone living nearby what they thought of the project. Two charming little towns were destroyed, and the once famously lovely lake changed forever. In today's climate, the road most likely could not be built. I am not sure that would be such a bad thing. But don't waste your breath blaming environmentalists for the change. What has changed is that now Americans expect their government to do what they want it to do, and they get really angry when they are ignored.

The Cost of Anti-immigrant Policy in Alabama

2012-02-04T20:21:00.001-05:00

A careful economic analysis of the costs and benefits of Alabama's strict new immigration law finds that it will cause the GDP of the state to shrink by between 1.3 and 6.2 percent and cost the state government $56.7m-264.5m in lost tax revenue.

The Coal Companies Try to Silence Michael Mann

2012-02-04T10:13:00.000-05:00

Since I was just complaining about attempts by climate alarmists to stifle scientific opposition to their findings, it only seems fair that I report on an attempt by coal companies to intimidate Penn State into canceling a speech by climate scientist Michael Mann. Kevin Drum:

We've documented the long-term effort to malign Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann here rather extensively. Now a coal-backed group is running a smear campaign targeting an upcoming speaking event Mann is holding on campus.

The Common Sense Movement and the Secure Energy for America Political Action Committee (CSM/SEAPAC) have started a petition asking Penn State to cancel Mann's Feb. 9 speech. In the petition, they rehash "Climategate" and accuse him of "allegedly manipulating scientific data to align with his extreme political views on global warming." The group offers a template letter for people to send to "daily newspapers near you" attacking Penn State for hosting a speech by "someone of such questionable ethics."

In two major papers in 1998 and 1999, Mann and colleagues presented evidence for the so-called "hockey stick" model of climate change. Their model, presented in the graph above, asserts that the 20th-century increase in global temperature is a dramatic departure from the fluctuations of the previous thousand years. This model has been hotly debated ever since -- wikipedia has a whole entry on the hockey stick controversy, to which I refer the curious for more detail -- and Mann has been accused of "manipulating" his data. Which, of course, he has, since the raw data on global temperature has to be approached using mathematical models and can't be understood at all without "manipulation." Whether Mann's model is the right one is a hard question, but there is nothing unscientific about his approach and it is just wrong to accuse him and his colleagues of "questionable ethics." They have made their data and their assumptions public, and anybody can check them. Plenty of people have, and some of them have disputed Mann et al.'s statistical methods. But this is scientific debate at a very high level, and I have trouble following the mathematical arguments about these models. It is not "fraud," as Mann's Republican critics like to claim, but a scientific dispute. At the moment the consensus seems to be with Mann, that the late 1990s were the warmest period in a thousand years. On the other hand, though, the world does not seem to have gotten much warmer in the decade since.

Mann has engaged in political action, based on his fears about the future of the climate, but that, it seems to me, is his right. He has also criticized some uses of his own data by environmentalists, including the printing of the hockey stick graph without error bars in a 2001 report from the U.S. National Commission on Climate Change. Penn State has every right to invite him to speak, and the coal companies are being deeply sleazy in trying to stop him.

Romance at the Lincoln Memorial

2012-02-04T09:28:00.000-05:00

According to the Washington Post, one of the most romantic spots in Washington, and a common spot for public marriage proposals, is the Lincoln Memorial.

Why? Is it the thrill of being under Lincoln's sad, marble gaze? Do young politicos get off on reading his speeches, carved on the walls? Is it young black couples imagining being present for King's "Dream" speech? The Greek Temple atmosphere? History buffs?

I love the place, but it makes me cry.

Ancient Colchis: the Golden Graves of Vani

2012-02-04T08:33:00.000-05:00

Ancient Colchis, the land of the Golden Fleece, is one of the places that haunts the shadowy edges of the known past. It was there, at the eastern end of the Black Sea, that Jason wooed Medea, the daughter of King Aeëtes, and with her help stole the kingdom's great treasure. "The farthest voyage," Pindar called it. Later on the place has a few scant mentions in Hellenistic and Roman sources. But what was it like?

Back in 2008 I saw an exhibit of artifacts from Colchis at the Sackler Gallery in Washington, and I just discovered that both the Sackler and New York University still have web sites for the exhibit. The artifacts come from two sanctuaries and four rich graves at a site called Vani in modern Georgia. The artifacts date to the 5th to 1st centuries BC. These artifacts reveal the style of the Colchian elite and show their connections with many ancient kingdoms. Above, gold peaks from the ground in Grave 24. The Freer Gallery has an interactive version of this photograph here. Grave 24 included five human sacrifices and a horse.

There are other skeletons in the graves of these kings and queens, and the evidence suggests that they were human sacrifices, slain to accompany their masters to the afterlife. Above, Grave 11, from the 5th Century BC.

A silver wine vessel from Grave 11. Many wine vessels were found in the graves, and the pouring of libations seems to have been a key rite for the Colchians.

Gold bracelet from Grave 11. The gold necklace at the top is also from this grave; it is made up of 31 of these turtles.

The exhibit's curators like to emphasize the cultural mixing that these artifacts represent. This pectoral ornament, they suggest, copies from Egyptian and Persian styles; other show Greek influence. As if the Colchians, surrounded by richer, more powerful nations, wanted to ape all of them at once.

This headdress ornament from Grave 24 resembles Scythian art, and also the bronzes of Luristan in Iran.

Gold "Temple Ornaments" from Grave 22. This grave was looted in antiquity but the looters somehow missed these. There are several Scythian tombs that present the same puzzle, of small but very valuable artifacts found in looted graves. Makes one wonder what they found that they thought was worth carrying away.

Evelyn De Morgan

2012-02-03T19:41:00.001-05:00

Evelyn Pickering De Morgan (1855-1919) was the female pre-Raphaelite painter, considered by some of her contemporaries to be the best female painter ever. She was one of those nineteenth-century characters, deeply involved in spiritualism, political reform, pacifism, and feminism. Her husband, William De Morgan, was a ceramicist, involved in the same causes as his wife. Together they produced a once-famous book of automatic writing, The Result of an Experiment (1909). Above, Clytie, 1886.

Some of her pictures are full of light and flowers and remind one of Botticelli; not by coincidence, since she and her husband spent every winter in Florence and she was a great admirer of the Renaissance Italians. Above, Flora, 1894.

Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamund, 1905.

I find myself more drawn to her darker paintings, like Night and Sleep, 1878.

The Angel of Death, 1890.

Demeter Mourning for Persephone, 1906.

Hope in a Prison of Despair, 1884. More paintings here.

But what inspired me to write this post was these paintings, De Morgan's response to World War I. In S O S (1915) and The Field of the Slain (1916), an elderly refugee from the optimistic Victorian age confronted the horror of total war, and a believer in spiritualism imagined a world of darkness.

The tomb she designed for her and her husband in 1918.

David Brooks Explains the Current Political Scene

2012-02-03T17:46:00.001-05:00

"This seems to be a moment of fervent protest movements that are ultimately vague and ineffectual."

I don't know that I've ever read anything I agree with more. Of course Brooks goes on to say lots of stupid things, but the basic insight, that we are dissatisfied but don't know how to make things better, is spot on.

All I Have to Say about the Susan G. Komen Foundation

2012-02-03T12:38:00.003-05:00

From lianamaris.

We're Pulling Out of Afghanistan

2012-02-03T12:31:00.001-05:00

Obama ran in 2008 on a promise to pull out of Iraq and fight harder in Afghanistan. In 2009 he therefore had little choice but to go along with the plan developed by his military chiefs, to send in more troops and spend more on nation building.

Now, though, it looks like he has decided that no feasible amount of men and money is going to transform Afghanistan, and he is headed for the exit as fast as he can without looking craven. He has already pulled out 10,000 troops and the withdrawal of 23,000 more is already scheduled. We agreed with our NATO allies on complete withdrawal of combat forces by the end of 2014, but Secretary Panetta let slip this week that we up that timetable and get out by the end of 2013. I agree with Fred Kaplan that Obama has had enough and will no longer listen to any general who thinks another year would make a big change. Can't happen soon enough, if you ask me.

Genes, Culture, and Monogamy

2012-02-03T11:52:00.002-05:00

Of all the human societies we know about, past and present, about 80% allow successful men to have more than one wife. In some of these, polygyny is common, while in others it is limited to kings or chiefs. Polygyny would seem to make sense in evolutionary terms, because the most successful men would have more offspring, and failures would be excluded from the gene pool.

However, in the modern period the world has been dominated by societies that enforce monogamy. In Europe, North America, and Japan, having more than one wife is a crime, and though we may not take this very seriously now, not so long ago we hanged men for bigamy.

Via Gene Expression, a new paper by Joseph Henrich et al. asks why. They have this to say:

In suppressing intrasexual competition and reducing the size of the pool of unmarried men, normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses. By assuaging the competition for younger brides, normative monogamy decreases (i) the spousal age gap, (ii) fertility, and (iii) gender inequality. By shifting male efforts from seeking wives to paternal investment, normative monogamy increases savings, child investment and economic productivity. By increasing the relatedness within households, normative monogamy reduces intra-household conflict, leading to lower rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death and homicide.

In other words, men who aren't fighting each other over wives do a lot of other good stuff for society.

I would also emphasize the increase in male social solidarity that results from every man having a woman. Modern polygynists are notoriously suspicious of other men, and have been known to kill them for just talking to one of their wives. (Or kill the wife.) Monogamous societies seem much less consumed with jealousy, especially when husbands and wives are of roughly equal age.

Binding men into monogamous marriages seems to go some distance toward taming their worst instincts; married men commit many fewer assaults and murders than single men, and they are more likely to have full-time jobs and contribute toward their children's upbringing. (Even children they had with other wives.)

So the model developed in both Europe and East Asia of monogamous marriage between people of nearly equal ages seems to work very well for modern societies. It remains an open question whether any society without such a system can achieve a modern level of economic and political development.

And that far more than compensates for any loss of individual evolutionary fitness. Your loosely organized tribesmen can be as tall, strong, and charismatic as you want, but they will still be slaughtered by the soldiers of a well-organized, bureaucratic state. People who can work together well will always beat people who can't.

A Strange Question about Israel and Iran

2012-02-03T07:56:00.002-05:00

The Washington Post is running a poll on their front page that asks this question:

If Israel attacks Iran, should the United States come to Israel's defense?

Wait. So Israel might be about to attack Iran, and the Post's editors want to know if we should then "come to Israel's defense"? Aren't they the attacker in this scenario? If attacking Iran poses some grave threat to them, they can avoid that threat by not attacking Iran.

What form would this "defense" take? I think I know the answer the neocons at the Post have in mind, which would be sending our planes to bomb Iran some more, finishing what Israel began. And I say that does not fit my definition of coming to an ally's defense.

Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb; I think only silly pacifists deny this. But I don't see what right Israel has to object, since they already have about 200 A-bombs of their own. If Israel has a right to a bomb, why doesn't Iran? Yes, Israel has been attacked several times by its neighbors, but Iran was attacked by Iraq not so long ago, and all they have to do is open the Post to see that many Americans want to attack them tomorrow. They have the same right to self-defense as any other nation. I would prefer a world without more nuclear-armed countries, but as long as we are going around the world, invading countries and overthrowing their governments, we have to expect that they will acquire whatever weapons they need to defend themselves.

If I were an Iranian, I would want my country to have nuclear weapons, because it is the only way to guarantee that they won't be invaded by America and subjected to the same kind of horror as the Iraqis.

As for the notion that the Iranian leadership is a bunch of irrational Armageddon-minded fanatics, I don't buy it. Iran has been around for 2,500 years old, an old and stable society. It's leaders sometimes talk tough, for domestic political reasons, just like Americans politicians sometimes do. They will not attack Israel with nuclear weapons, knowing what would then happen to their country.

The lesson of the Cold War is that deterrence works. The lesson of history is that war is hell. Paranoid Israelis should settle down, and Americans should do all we can to discourage their aggression.

Cool, Sustainable Mobile Homes

2012-02-03T07:28:00.000-05:00

This structure, called the TaliesinMod.Fab, was designed by students at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture in Arizona as a sustainable alternative to traditional mobile homes for desert living. It has 600 square feet of living space and can be transported on a flatbed truck, including its solar panels, rainwater collection system, and engineered ventilation.

Martian Dunes

2012-02-02T21:24:00.001-05:00

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter photo of the north polar region.

Experimental Archaeology

2012-02-02T21:13:00.003-05:00

Estonian students spending a winter week an a replicated Iron Age hut found it "cold, dark, and smoky."

What You Can Buy for $22.4 Million

2012-02-02T19:48:00.002-05:00

Claude Monet, Les peupliers (1891). Sold by Christie's last May.

Statues from Iron Age Arabia

2012-02-02T19:42:00.000-05:00

The Top Five Regrets of the Dying

2012-02-02T18:22:00.000-05:00

Australian nurseBronnie Ware has spent her career taking care of the dying, and she has written two books about what people think about as they die. The most recent is The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. The Guardian has a summary:

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
"This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it."
2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
"This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence."
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
"Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result."
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
"Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying."
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
"This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again."

The Folly of Wapiti Valley

2012-02-02T14:33:00.000-05:00

House in Wapiti Valley, Wyoming, built by engineer Francis Smith. He threw his life into building this crazy place, with no running water and power only from a generator. His wife eventually moved out, taking the children with her to town. Smith held on, adding to and tinkering with house until 1992, when he died in a fall from a balcony. He was 48. Since then the house has slowly decayed. The NY Times has an article and slide show.

What Government Is

2012-02-02T12:27:00.000-05:00

Government is what we call the things we do together.

--Barney Frank

Americans Love Pain Pills

2012-02-02T11:50:00.001-05:00

A doctor laments:

What you may not be aware of is that despite the fact that only 5 percent of the world’s population lives in the United States, 80 percent of the world’s prescription narcotics are consumed here. . . . Annual prescriptions for opiates topped 131 million in 2010.

Knowledge, Belief and Evolution

2012-02-02T09:16:00.001-05:00

A recent study of Koreans in training to become science teachers showed no correlation between the amount they knew about biology and their acceptance of evolutionary theory. Those who know more facts are not more likely to accept evolution. Instead, the researchers found that people go with their intuition or "gut feeling" about whether evolution is true.

Obviously there is some relationship between data and belief in the brains of our strange species, but that relationship is not a simple one, and people who parcel out their beliefs strictly according to the evidence are very rare.

Wendelstein Church, Germany

2012-02-02T08:28:00.003-05:00

In the midst of a European cold snap.

Lifting the Lid in Egypt

2012-02-02T07:58:00.001-05:00

A stable authoritarianism like the one that dominated Egypt for 50 years has high costs: spreading corruption, routine police brutality, the stifling of creative energies, the monopolization of power by people who really care about nothing but extending that monopoly. As the years drone by, a sort of depression can settle on the nation, expressed in despondent jokes, low productivity, and a desire to emigrate.

In their defense, the authoritarians always say that without them, chaos would break out. And they are not necessarily wrong. Look around the world, and you see that the transition from authoritarian to democratic rule is often accompanied by violence and some measure of social breakdown. Yugoslavia is an extreme case, but there has also been great turmoil in Thailand, South Africa, Iraq, Russia, and other places. Sometimes the conflict that erupts is ethnic, other times (as in Thailand) between peasants and the urban middle class, and in other places (South Africa) it takes the form of a massive surge in crime. It is easy to blame the outgoing authoritarians for the crisis, but even if they sometimes stoke the fires in a bid to hold onto power, I do not think they are responsible for the overall problem. Entirely peaceful transitions like those in Poland and Czechoslovakia are rare in history, and some level of turmoil is much more common.

I was thinking about this because of yesterday's soccer riot in Egypt, which left 74 dead. So far as I can tell, there was no special political animosity between the fans of the two teams; neither was associated with any particular political party. The only complaint against the police seems to be that they did nothing, and I have seen no accusations against them for fomenting the unrest. Instead it seems that Egyptian soccer fans are just a rowdy bunch, and that their lessening fear of the police has unleashed their basest instincts. Oppressed, Egypt's people built up a reservoir of rage and frustration that powered their political protests. Elections and parliamentary maneuvering are not very good channels for those feelings, so some of the rage may explode in other ways. Of course, the citizens of democracies also have reservoirs of rage that sometimes explode, but the problem is worse in countries experiencing profound political change. A lid has been lifted, and what boils out is sometimes ugly.

I have also been thinking, about Egypt, that nations embarking on democracy often do not vote in the way the leaders of pro-democracy movements would like. In Russia, liberal reformers have been marginalized, and the only ideas with wide electoral appeal are authoritarian nationalism and communism. This seems to be changing now, but certainly the immediate aftermath of the revolution led people to recoil against chaos. In Thailand, the middle class engineers of their democracy were shocked that their compatriots, especially the peasants, voted for a populist regime that they regarded as a theft ring. In eastern Europe the dominant parties have been conservative, nationalist, and religious, not exactly what Vaclav Havel and his friends had in mind. And in Egypt the people voted overwhelmingly for religious parties that have pledged to put Islam first and democracy second. How they will behave in office remains to be seen, but it is certainly possible that they will ally with conservative army officers to ensure that Egypt changes as little as possible.

None of this is any reason to despair. Political change is messy. Democracy is not a magic formula for change and reform, and those who thought the fall of Mubarak would immediately turn Egypt into Turkey were deluded. If that happens, it will take decades. Meanwhile, democracy is just plain better than authoritarian rule, and it opens up the possibility of other vital changes, such as an accountable judicial system and reduced corruption. The struggle for freedom and justice is never finished, and change never happens as quickly as revolutionaries would like.

To End Mass Hysteria, Have a Party

2012-02-01T12:29:00.003-05:00

Ruth Graham, from an article about the lastest American outbreak of group hysteria, among girls at a high school in upstate New York:

Until more is known about mass hysteria, the treatment of a 1789 case in Northern England might point the way to a cure both effective and enjoyable. The outbreak at a textile factory started when one woman teased another by putting a mouse in her dress; the skittish prank victim fell into convulsions. Soon, however, a rumor spread that an open bag of imported cotton had somehow caused the reaction, and others quickly began falling ill. The factory had to temporarily shut down when 24 people (21 women, two young girls, and one man) experienced violent convulsions so severe they had to be restrained. The plague ended when authorities convinced the patients that symptoms were “merely nervous.” To further tamp down anxieties, sufferers were encouraged to “take a cheerful glass and join in a dance.” The day after the dance, almost all the victims went back to work, their convulsions having disappeared for good.

Walt Whitman at Dupont Circle

2012-02-01T08:02:00.000-05:00

My regular exit from the Dupont Circle Metro has closed for eight months for the rebuilding of its enormous escalators (how can it possibly take eight months to rebuild three escalators?), so I switched to the other exit. I haven't used that one in many years, so I did not know about the lines from Walt Whitman that in 2007 were carved in granite around the opening:

Thus in silence in dreams' projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals;
The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night - some are so young;
Some suffer so much - I recall the experience sweet and sad. . . .

These lines are from The Wound Dresser, a poem about Whitman's experience as a nurse in the Civil War. It is, shall we say, an interesting choice for a public monument. It describes Whitman'sshifting attitude toward the war he at first enthusiastically supported:

Arous'd and angry, I'd thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war,
But soon my fingers fail'd me, my face droop'd and I resign'd myself,
To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead

For Whitman the glory receded, and the war came to be more and more about the experience of tending for the dying.

And for Whitman, that experience was not only sad but also profoundly erotic. The carved quotation politely omits the next two lines, which are the last of the poem:

(Many a soldier's loving arms about this neck have cross'd and rested,
Many a soldier's kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)

Caring for beautiful young men, horribly wounded and near to death, was for Whitman an act of love, not just love for life or humanity or god, but passionate love for the men he cared for. The people who chose that quotation for the Metro knew this, and the inscription thus becomes, not just an anti-war message, but an affirmation of homosexuality.

It is clever, tasteful, and beautiful, affirming the values of peace without mocking war or warriors, pointing to a bit of local history -- the hospitals where Whitman served were in Washington -- and giving public acknowledgment to the many gay inhabitants of the neighborhood without needlessly offending anyone who doesn't know the rest of the poem.

More Whitman:

But in silence, in dreams' projections,
While the world of gain and appearance and mirth goes on,
So soon what is over forgotten, and waves wash the imprints off the sand,
With hinged knees returning I enter the doors, (while for you up there,
Whoever you are, follow without noise and be of strong heart.)
Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,
Straight and swift to my wounded I go,
Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in,
Where their priceless blood reddens the grass the ground,
Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof'd hospital,
To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return,
To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss,
An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail,
Soon to be fill'd with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill'd again.
I onward go, I stop,
With hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds,
I am firm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable,
One turns to me his appealing eyes--poor boy! I never knew you,
Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that
would save you.

Romney's Rise, or, the Tragedy of Newt

2012-02-01T07:34:00.002-05:00

I was just musing on the way Newt Gingrich's political season follows the plot of an Aristotelian tragedy. A man launches himself into conflict with great forces, and by wit and courage seems for a while to best them, but in the end he is undone by some personal failing and fate crushes him beneath her cruel sandals. Romney, the machine candidate, the one with no passion but ambition, with whom no audience can really identify, has the Republican gods behind him, so Gingrich's struggle to rehabilitate his name and reclaim his place in the corridors of power was always doomed to fail. Against the party men and their money, no lone hero can hope to contend, no matter how much of his life he pours into the contest.

Of course, Gingrich has a lot more problems than the one flaw Aristotle specified, but then Aristotle never really understood tragedy anyway.

As much fun as it would be to see Newt as the Republican candidate, it would not really be a good thing for the country. The election should be about competing visions for the future, not the peculiar personality of one candidate. An Obama-Romney election presents the country with a clear choice. Both are men whom one can easily see as President, who are clearly qualified for the job, who will not be undone by embarrassing personal revelations or stupid remarks. Nobody loves Romney, but not many people hate him enough to vote against him even though they prefer his policies.

So we will have a clear choice: on the one side the man from Wall Street, the apostle of unfettered financial capitalism and overseas aggression, with a Reagan-esque platform of tax cuts, defense increases, and slashing the rest of the government. On the other the brown-skinned former professor, dedicated to finding, with his intellect and his brilliant advisers, some kind of middle course between socialism and free markets, and between war and weakness.

In truth, of course, the election will depend mainly on how the economy performs over the next nine months. If it keeps improving, Obama will almost certainly win. If it crashes again, Romney wins. There is a part of me that wants some sort of middle-ground stagnation, so that the odds won't be too strongly tilted toward either man, and the voters will have to think about the choices offered them instead of just voting their paychecks. But then I think, no, that's stupid, what the country needs is an economic boom and an Obama landslide.

Newt will be watching from home, pondering what might have been.

David Hall, Beneath Cold Seas: the Underwater Wilderness of the Pacific Northwest

2012-01-31T21:09:00.002-05:00

This book is a revelation. David Hall's astonishing photographs show the vibrant colors and teeming life of a part of the world I always thought was rather drab, the oceans off Canada's Pacific coast. Sure, I knew about seals and sea otters and kelp, and killer whales, but I never suspected these spectacular wonders. I have never looked through a book of nature photographs that wowed me so consistently. From brilliant anemones to illuminated squid to rococo sea slugs, Hall has documented an Alladin's Cave worth of visual wonders.

Here is a night time swarm of cross jellies, from the surface and under water.

A sculpin.

Sea stars.

Salmon headed upstream.

Sea pens.

A wolf eel.

Most of these pictures are from Hall's web site; I tried scanning other images, but to capture their glory required files of unmanageable size. Look for this at your library, and keep it in mind for any nature lovers on your next Christmas list. Amazing.

Snake Trouble in the Everglades

2012-01-31T05:55:00.001-05:00

Imported snakes are taking over the Everglades, displacing alligators as the top predators and, a new study says, causing a decline in native mammals like raccoons and bobcats. Above, "University of Florida researchers hold a 162-pound Burmese python captured in Everglades National Park, Fla. Therese Walters, left, Alex Wolf and Michael R. Rochford are holding the 15-foot snake shortly after the python ate a six-foot American alligator."

Requiring Catholic Universities to Pay for Birth Control

2012-01-30T20:04:00.001-05:00

Ross Douthat, who often makes sense except when anything to do with religion is on the agenda, wrote a long lamentation in the Times to the effect that requiring institutions run by churches, but not fundamentally religious -- e.g., Catholic hospitals and Baptist universities -- to pay for birth control is

an intimation of a darker American future, in which our voluntary communities wither away and government becomes the only word we have for the things we do together.

This is what you might call a slippery slope leading to a cliff leading to an abyss sort of argument. A tad overblown, shall we say? But I don't think churches are being crazy to protest the birth control rule. Problems like this are one of the reasons I think we should have government-run healthcare instead of a mandated private scheme like the Affordable Care Act. We should not rely on private entities to guarantee what we have decided is a right of all the citizens.

But since we have decided to provide health insurance through employer-subsidized private plans, those plans have to provide public rights as the public -- through the government -- defines them. Since we are trying to make health insurance a right for everyone, employees shouldn't lose that right when they choose to work for a Catholic University instead of a public one.

I think that in general the civil rights of employees always trump the civil rights of employers. Nobody should lose a right because the only job he or she can get is at a Baptist college.

Hopi Petroglyphs

2012-01-30T17:56:00.000-05:00

In most of the world, petroglyphs remain largely mysterious. They were carved long ago by people whose cultures have vanished, and at best we can vaguely relate them to half-forgotten myths. Most could mean anything.

This is not true in the American southwest. Here, thousands of surviving petroglyphs were carved by people whose culture still endures among the Hopi and Zuni.

The most common symbols are those of the Hopi clans, of which these are a sample.

Others depict the myths that the Hopi reenact in their famous rituals.

These depict the trickster musician kokopelli.

Mindful of this heritage, the Hopi tribe has been cooperating in an effort to digitally record the most important petroglyph sites, especially those no longer on tribal lands. A worthy cause, I would say.

100% of Economists Agree

2012-01-30T12:33:00.000-05:00

Wonkblog:

Northwestern University and University of Chicago’s business schools surveyed a group of top economists, as well as the public at large, and found some big differences when it came to economic policy. Some of the questions tested basic economic literary: A full 100 percent of economists agreed that permanently raising the federal tax rate by 1 percent for those in the top income tax bracket would increase federal tax revenue over the next 10 years. By contrast, only 66 percent of the general public agreed that this was the case, with just 50 percent of Republicans concurring and 80 percent of Democrats.

So there you have it. People who know something about taxation and government revenue, whether we're talking economists or the Congressional budget office, agree that raising taxes raises government revenue. This is also what you find empirically, that is, raising taxes has, historically, always raised government revenue. Why do so many Americans disagree?

I can think of two reasons. First, many people think that rich people somehow weasel out of paying taxes, which they often do, but not so well that they don't still pay a lot in tax. Second, the Republicans have been lying about this since Reagan, and they have persuaded a lot of people who dislike taxes that they really don't work. But they do work, that is, they raise money for the government, and the higher they are, the more money they raise.

Today's Indian Palace: Thirumalai Nayak, Madurai

2012-01-29T21:04:00.000-05:00

This impressive palace was built in the 1630s by King Thirumalai Nayak. Madurai is in India's far south, and this architectural style is called Dravidian. Only about a quarter of the original palace remains, mainly two buildings facing a columned courtyard. One is the royal audience hall, the other a dance hall. (Meanwhile a place to watch professional dancers, not a ballroom.) The king is supposed to have consulted an Italian architect in the design, but so far as I can tell this is a bit of nineteenth-century folklore and it may have been dreamed up to explain the octagonal dome and the European details in the molding.

The audience hall is a very impressive space.

The dance hall.

This 1798 drawing by Thomas Daniel shows some of the ruins that once surrounded the surviving parts of the palace, until they were built over.

America is Not Becoming More Polarized

2012-01-29T20:37:00.000-05:00

Pollsters have been asking Americans a standard set of political questions since 1970, and the latest study of this data shows that America is not becoming more polarized. People are spread across the political spectrum in about the way they always have been, with a lot of us in the middle.

On the other hand, Americans think the country is becoming more polarized. But just ordinary folks; political professionals and Congressmen correctly believe that we are about as polarized as always.

Why might people think the country is more polarized? Well, the political parties are becoming more polarized, with the demise of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. So it is harder to put together a bipartisan coalition. And the news media have also grown more polarized, at least on cable tv and the internet.

From Burning Man 2010

2012-01-29T14:38:00.003-05:00

200 Years of Mississippi Steam

2012-01-29T12:11:00.004-05:00

On January 27, 1812, the first steamboat docked at New Orleans. Built at Pittsburgh by a consortium of investors that included Robert Fulton, the New Orleans took four months to make the journey. Contemporary drawing of the New Orleans above.

Bluebird

2012-01-29T11:39:00.000-05:00

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

--Charles Bukowski

The Rocks by Helder Domingos

2012-01-28T22:11:00.004-05:00

Conspiracy Theories and Contradictory Beliefs

2012-01-28T22:03:00.002-05:00

A study of people who believe in conspiracy theories showed that their main motive seems to be distrust of authority, or resistance to the official version of events. They are more likely to believe any idea that is contrary to the mainstream narrative, even if it contradicts other things they believe. People who think Princess Diana faked her own death are more likely that others to think she was murdered. People who think Osama bin Laden was dead before 9-11 are more likely than others to think he is still alive.

Dancing in the Kitchen, Saturday Afternoon

2012-01-28T13:24:00.002-05:00

My sister-in-law and my two youngest children, today.

Chitons

2012-01-28T08:28:00.004-05:00

Marine molluscs of the class Polyplacophora, of which there are more than 900 species. Many are brightly colored.

Wolf Crazy: in California, Mad for OR7

2012-01-28T08:03:00.001-05:00

A GPS-collar wearing wolf known to biologists as OR7 has become a celebrity in California. OR7 is a young male gone wandering, as many young male predators do, looking for his own territory and mate. On December 28 he crossed into California and became the first wolf to live in the state in 88 years. (That's him above, back in November.) This has launched a little media frenzy of news reports, and a contest to give him a name -- "Journey" was the winner. Now he has at least two twitter accounts, one of which, WolfOR7, has this for its profile:

Native Oregonian, now living in California. Grew up in troubled family. Daddy wanted by the law. Hobbies: wandering, ungulates. Don't call me Journey.

Sample tweets:

This deep snow is an elk-chaser's dream. Didn't need/miss the pack today. You haven't lived until you've dined on elk liver.

Why is everybody so worried about my love life?

I have mixed feelings about all this. The picture above is OR7's father, the alpha male of the Imnaha pack, with tags on both ears and his own GPS collar. He looks like anything but a wild wolf. And, in truth, these animals are not truly wild, but "managed."

Wolves are exciting. They represent the wild in its pure, dangerous form, and of course people are thrilled to hear that there are wolves back in California. As wolves slowly spread across the Rocky Mountains -- according to the Fish and Wildlife Service, there are now 1,651 in the region -- something wonderful that was lost is coming back. The picture above is the Imnaha pack: alpha female to left, alpha male in center, juvenile in back and a pup to the right. This is a healthy wolf pack, breeding and increasing their numbers.

But even in the remote country of northeast Oregon they have to be carefully tracked. The wolf recovery has been managed by people at every step, under the terms of the Endangered Species Act. This law is bureaucracy in its most maddening form, hated by timber companies, miners, and anyone who wants to build anything in some parts of the country. The recovery of the American wolf has come at a real cost, tens of millions of dollars in direct government expenditures and at least as much by people struggling to comply with the ESA. I think it has been worth it, and I think most Americans agree. Wolves have recovered so well in the Great Lakes region, with more than 4,000 in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, that last month that population was removed from the Endangered Species List. Wolves may soon be delisted across much of the Rocky Mountains as well.

Delisting will reduce the paperwork burden but it won't end the conflicts between wolves and people. This is and always has been a troubled relationship, especially since humans started raising sheep. Wolves love sheep, which from their perspective are fat, juicy meals too stupid to run away. They will attack cattle if they catch one alone. They also kill dogs. They don't attack people very often but it can happen, and they make parents very nervous.

So the management of wolves will continue -- tracking collars for selected animals, population studies, shooting of individuals and even whole packs who get the habit of sheep stealing. The world has become too crowded, and our expectations of safety too high, for us just to leave wolves alone. Like many environmentally-minded people I sometimes fantasize about creating immense national parks spanning whole states -- Wyoming, anyone? -- where animals could really be wild. But that won't happen. Instead we will continue to live together with animals, and they will not be truly wild, any more than the twitter-celebrity OR7 is.

The Gates of Hell

2012-01-27T18:57:00.000-05:00

In Turkmenistan, in 1971, geologists drilling a test well tapped into a cavern filled with natural gas. The ground beneath the drilling rig collapsed, leaving a hole 230 feet (70 meters) across. To protect themselves from the poisonous gas, the geologists set it on fire. It's still burning. Locals call the spot the Gates of Hell.

From World of Mysteries.

Are Bonobos Self-Domesticated Chimps?

2012-01-27T17:28:00.001-05:00

Self domestication is an idea that I think may explain a lot of human evolution over the past 50,000 years. The basic concept comes from the Belyaev fox experiment, carried out by Russian geneticist Dmitry Belyaev. Belyaev showed that he could produce the whole suite of traits that mark domesticated animals, from short faces to spotted coats, by breeding silver foxes for one trait: the willingness to be touched by people. What if, as we came to live in larger and more settled communities, we effectively selected ourselves for our willingness to live at close quarters with other people? That might explain a big part of why we look different than we did 30,000 years ago.

Now that same idea has been proposed as a way to explain the differences between chimps and bonobos. Ed Yong:

The two apes above might look very similar to the untrained eye, but they belong to two very different species. The one on the right is a bonobo; the one on the left is a chimpanzee. They are very closely related but the bonobo is slimmer, with a smaller skull, shorter canines and tufts of lighter fur. There are psychological differences too. Bonobos spend more time having sex, and playing with one another. They’re less sensitive to stress. They’re more sensitive to social cues. And they are far less aggressive than chimps.

Many years back, a young researcher called Brian Hare was listening to the Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham expound on this bizarre constellation of traits. “He was talking about how bonobos are an evolutionary puzzle,” recalls Hare. “They have all these weird traits relative to chimps and we have no idea how to explain them.”

But Hare had an idea. “I said, ‘Oh that’s like the silver foxes!’

Fascinating.

Meanwhile, in Tennessee

2012-01-27T17:11:00.005-05:00

Some people can't stand facts that complicate the world, making heroes less good or villains less bad:

Tennessee teachers shouldn't talk about American slavery and race together. That's what the State's Tea Party is saying.

Its on of a list of the five legislative priorities presented to state legislators by several Tennessee tea parties, includes a proposal to eliminate from history books references to the Founding Fathers owning slaves or encroaching on Native American lands, originally reported by a Memphis newspaper.

We talked to Tea Party leader Hal Rounds Wednesday. He described the way slavery is taught now as race-baiting. When asked if kids are walking out of school thinking our founding fathers were evil, he said "(The kids) are being taught (the Founding Fathers) were hypocrites and slave owners and part of the teachings about slavery was that it was inherently cruel."

Albino Hummingbird

2012-01-27T16:58:00.001-05:00

Photographed by teenage friends in Staunton, Virginia.

An Ordinary Tenant Cabin at Antietam, 1862

2012-01-27T09:40:00.000-05:00

Studying the Civil War can get depressing -- so much death, and so many blunders by all concerned that had the effect of stretching the war out for four long years. Antietam is particularly depressing in this way. Lee, spoiling for a fight, deployed his outnumbered men in a weak position, inviting attack by a Union army that outnumbered his 2 to 1, apparently because he felt such scorn for McClellan that he thought he could beat him no matter the odds. Even as his own position was near to collapse he was trying to organize a counter-attack that would have been even more disastrous than Pickett's Charge, had Stonewall Jackson not been able to talk him out of it. But if McClellan was weak, many of this officers were not, and they led the troops McClellan let them take into the battle to the verge of a great victory. Then, when commitment of one of McClellan's two reserve Corps would have sealed that victory and driven the Confederates from the field, McClellan refused, taking one of his pompous poses and saying, "you forget, Gentlemen, that I command the last reserves of the Republic." (Which wasn't even true.) So a day that began with Lee arrogantly exposing his men to Union attack ended, after 3500 on both sides had been killed, with McClellan shamefully refusing to claim the victory his men had won for him.

But one thing I always like about battlefield studies is the window they open into nineteenth-century America. You might be surprised to learn how few descriptions we have of how ordinary people lived just 150 years ago. Before 1860, most of our best accounts were written by foreigners. People wrote about their own lives, or about what seemed interesting or exciting to them. Since few of the diarists and letter writers were poor, we don't have much in the words of poor Americans. And since poor folks were just part of the landscape in which people grew up and lived, nobody bothered to describe their homes and ways of life. Unless, that is, they were far from home, and things were different than what they were used to. In the letters of Civil War soldiers, preserved because of the momentous event they were engaged in, are thousands of descriptions of the people, customs, houses, and farms of they places they were sent to fight. A sample of one of my favorites, written by a Sergeant of the 13th Massachusetts in Stafford County, Virginia:

The house was simply a log house about 15 feetsquare, containing one room with a door on either side; for a window there wasa hole about two feet square with a sliding board in the inside to stop it upwhen needed. The fireplace and chimney were built on the outside of the houseof sticks and mud in regular Virginiastyle. In one corner of the room on the opposite side from the fireplace stoodthe family bed. In the corner on the left of the fireplace stood a table, inthe center of the room was a bench about four feet long, used for a seat, andthere was two chairs without backs, or stools; I have forgotten which. When weentered Mr. Bullard sat on one, and Mrs. Bullard sat on the other, while thefive children, the eldest a girl of fourteen, sat on the bench or floor. Onbeing introduced Mr. Bullard arose, shook hands, and invited me to take a seat,offering at the same time his stool. Mrs. Bullard arose, courtesied, andresumed her seat. Declining with thanks Mr. Bullard’s offer of his seat, Isaid, “I would sit with Haskell on the bench.” We sat facing the fire; thechildren were scattered promiscuously around. I not noticed why Mrs. Bullardsat so near the fire; she was preparing a meal for them, and the pot was overthe fire in which was their “pone cake”, also a frying pan in which, swimmingits own fat, was the ever to be found “smoked sides.” On the hearth were twoold tin cans (such as the boys had bought can fruit of the sutler in) in whichshe was making coffee. Mr. Bullard was chewing tobacco, and spitting into, orrather towards the fire, and as he sat some distance away, many were the timesthat he failed of his mark and there was stream between him and the fire.

Likewise there are few photographs of ordinary houses and farms, except that there are hundreds of photographs of the places where Civil War battles were fought. So the houses of poor folks that happened to lie in the path of armies have been documented for us by photographers interested in something else. Because the glass plate negatives used by those photographers preserved so much detail -- when properly focused and lit -- houses that are just blobs in the corner of battlefield vistas can be blown up to show the details of life. Like in this picture of the Middle Bridge over Antietam Creek. In the yard of this little tenant house, the home of some otherwise unknown family, you can see the tumble-down lean-to, the wheelbarrow, the weed-infested garden, the laundry on the line, and a hundred other items that make nineteenth-century life real for me in a way that nothing else does.

Debating Climate Change

2012-01-27T08:27:00.001-05:00

One thing about scientists is that they hate to be told what to think. Many scientists have a skeptical approach to all knowledge (Richard Feynman: "nothing is known absolutely"), and they regard all assertions that X or Y is certain as inherently dubious. Nothing raises the hackles of a certain sort of scientist like telling them, "you must believe this because the evidence is irrefutable."

Some of these people are pushing back hard against the assertion that human-caused global warming is a "fact." From the Wall Street Journal:

In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: "I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: 'The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.' In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?"

And:

many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

Global warming alarmists have indeed engaged in all sorts of dirty tricks, from trying to keep anti-global warming papers out of the journals to gaming the job market to make warming critics unemployable. They probably think that this is necessary, given the great wealth and political power of the fossil fuel industries and their allies. But it is wrong and it is only hurting their cause.

The good news is that scientists are a hard lot to bully, and in modern science the side with the data almost always wins in the end. The bad news is that modeling the climate is very, very hard, and we won't really know if our CO2 emissions will lead to a climate disaster until after it occurs.

John Singer Sargent in Italy

2012-01-26T22:09:00.000-05:00

Most of these were painted on one trip in 1910. Above, The Olive Grove.

Florence, Torre Galli, 1910.

The Loggia, 1910.

Torre Galli, Ladies in a Garden, 1910.

Venice, 1906.

Fobe House, by Agence Guilhem Eustache

2012-01-26T20:01:00.001-05:00

In Marrakech, Morocco, 2007. Only 1800 square feet of living space, great views of the mountains, high modern style. Not very comfortable, but quite striking, and maybe what the owner wants on his vacations is an ascetic experience of desert beauty.

Newt Gingrich and Saul Alinsky

2012-01-26T19:19:00.003-05:00

Long ago, Barrack Obama worked with radical agitator and community organizer Saul Alinsky. Most people have forgotten about this, but Newt Gingrich keeps bringing it up; in his South Carolina victory speech, he said, "The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky."

But as Philip Klein points out in a terrific essay, it is really Newt who is a follower of Alinsky:

In his seminal 1971 work, Rules for Radicals, left-wing community organizer Alinsky laid out his method for instigating change. Many of the tactics he spoke about -- such as exploiting resentment and pitting oneself against the establishment -- have become a central part of Gingrich's strategy for securing the Republican presidential nomination. . . .

Gingrich's clashes against the establishment are classic Alinsky. "The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a 'dangerous enemy,'" Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals. He went on to reveal that, "Today, my notoriety and the hysterical instant reaction of the establishment not only validate my credentials of competency but also ensure automatic popular invitation."

Though Gingrich has spent several decades profiting from being part of the Washington establishment, the fact that he's been attacked by so-called "elites" has become self-validating.

And the way he scolded CNN moderator John King in last Thursday's South Carolina debate followed Alinsky's 13th tactical rule, which states: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

Alinsky argued that a faceless target such as City Hall, or in this case, the mainstream media, isn't as powerful of a target as individual person. And by "freeze it," he meant that whoever the target is shouldn't be allowed to pin the blame on somebody else. . . .

After weak showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, Gingrich's campaign was on life support. So he resorted to unleashing an aggressive attack against Mitt Romney's wealth and career at private equity firm Bain Capital. Many prominent conservatives and Republicans pounced, seeing it as an attack on capitalism itself. Even Rudy Giuliani, somebody who has had harsh words for Romney (his opponent in the 2008 GOP presidential race), likened Gingrich's tactics to Alinsky's.

But though they angered many on the right, the attacks undermined Romney's electability argument -- which had previously been his main asset in the GOP nomination battle.