Early Medieval Gold

Some objects recently for sale at Timeline Auctions that date to the early Middle Ages or the barbarianized late Roman Empire. These objects are identified by culture and date, but you need not take that too seriously; similar jewelry was made across Europe over several centuries. The pendant above is identified as Gothic, c 500-900 CE.

Saxon gold and garnet jewelry, c. 400-700 CE.

Gothic strap end, 6th century CE.

Saxon gold ring, c 600 to 900 CE.

Ostrogothic horse harness set, gold and garnets, and detail, c. 300 to 500 CE.

Gothic gold ring with garnet, c. 500 to 750 CE.

Anglo-Saxon gilt button brooch, 6th Century CE.

Merovingian Frankish Gilt Bird-Head Mount, c. 500 to 700 CE.

Freedom and Libertarianism

Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate for president, made waves in libertarian circles this week by taking some positions contrary to the usual libertarian orthodoxy:

Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, in an interview with Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner, calls religious freedom “a black hole” and endorses a federal role in preventing “discrimination” in all its guises. More specifically, he’s okay with fining a wedding photographer for not working a gay wedding – a case from New Mexico where Cato and every libertarian I know supported the photographer – and forcing the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for contraceptives (where again Cato and libertarians supported religious liberty).

But as John Holbo explains, this is a case where libertarian doctrine and actual liberty may be on opposite sides:

I can’t say that Johnson’s ‘black hole’ metaphor was entirely clear, but it ought to be clear what he is worried about. If I can refuse to serve a gay person, on religious grounds, why not a Jew, a Catholic, an African-American? To adapt Sinclair: it’s hard to get a man NOT to believe something sincerely, on religious grounds, if believing it, sincerely, on religious grounds, will permit him to push around his neighbor, whom he dislikes, with legal impunity he would not otherwise enjoy. Does anyone doubt that the Bob Jones folks sincerely believed the Bible supported them? . . .

The thought-experiment is easy and obvious: suppose a crushing form of Jim Crow were maintained, not by the government, but by a powerful, coordinated coalition of private actors who, for good measure, sincerely believe their religion demands no less of them? Would that be acceptable? Would this be ‘freedom’, technically, not just for those maintaining the system but also for those kept down by it? If so, is it obvious we should care about maximizing ‘freedom’ – rather than something more, you know, free.

Many libertarians don't like to admit it, but sometimes governments act to increase freedom. When the Federal army crushed the Confederacy and put an end to slavery in North America, that led to a great increase in human liberty.

If you are serious about freedom, you can't just focus on restraining the actions of governments. As things are right now, governments make a great many of the rules and limit our freedom quite a lot. But if we didn't have governments, we might not find ourselves more free; instead we might find that giant corporations, neighborhood associations and so on stepped into the breech with even more burdensome rules.

Johnson may or may not be right in his choices; I agree with him, but then I am not especially obsessed with liberty. But he is absolutely right that if the goal is to maximize freedom, minimizing government alone with not get us there.

Arabian Sand Cat

Hard for me to believe that this is an actual wild predator, but the evidence seems to be strong.

This looks a little wilder.

But otherwise just cute cats. These were in the news this week because a new effort to count them in Abu Dhabi found about the expected number – which is not many because they have always been rare. According to the usual sources, they have very furry paws to keep sand out of their pads and can live without ever drinking, getting all their fluids from their prey.

Gregory Van Maanen

 American artist born in New Jersey in 1947. He fought in Vietnam, was wounded and received a Purple Heart. He began painting after his return from the Army, seeking healing. More at the Cavin Morris Gallery.

Tiny Odin Amulet found in Denmark

A metal detectorist on the Danish island of Lolland found this tiny amulet, the size of a fingernail. Although it is somewhat abstract it probably represents Odin in his high seat, with his ravens behind him.

Compare this larger example from Lejre.

Via the History Blog.

Should We Ban Self-Driving Trucks?

I am not at all sure that self-driving cars are on the edge of reality. But I think self-driving long-haul trucks might well be just a few years away. Not much happens out on the Interstate, and the biggest danger is the driver falling asleep. That seems to me like a challenge computers can handle pretty easily.

Which means that within a decade self-driving trucks may put most of the 1.5 million long-haul truckers in the country out of work. Most of these truckers are drawn from the same demographic that has suffered the biggest decline in status over the past fifty years, men from rural areas and small towns.

Should we let that happen?

If we care about inequality, why should we let a million jobs disappear so the owners of Google and the trucking firms can get richer? If we care about ordinary people doing ordinary jobs, why would we let technology take the livelihoods of a million of them? What would we be gaining that would be worth so much?

We absolutely could do this; this is not a case in which other countries could take over the work, or where the technology would creep in no matter what we do. It would not be difficult to enforce a law requiring a human driver in every large truck.

But should we? And if not, why not?

Kate Atkinson, "Life After Life"

You only live once, they say. But Ursula Todd, the heroine of Kate Atkinson's Life after Life (2013) lives again and again, experiencing about two dozen different lives that one English woman born in 1910 might have lived. In one of those lives, it is hinted on the first page, she may have assassinated Hitler in 1930.

In the rest Ursula lives the various permutations of a woman of her class and time. This sounds hokey, and at times it did remind me of Groundhog Day, but actually it worked rather well. Instead of seeing the characters in 200 different incidents, we see them in a dozen slightly different versions of the same twenty or so incidents, exploring various ways they might have responded. To take just one example, we see the family devastated by the death of their favorite younger son in a bomber over Germany, or their happy togetherness should he survive. Rather than everything depending on how certain chances turn out – will influenza strike the family in 1918? will Ursula die in the Blitz, flee into the country, or stay in London and survive? – we see several different rolls of the dice, and the outcome of each.

My main complaint is that some stretches are boring. We have here yet another upper middle English family of the old school, with an Irish maid and a grouchy cook, doing fairly commonplace things. I've read those scenes too many times. For me the book is better when it is weirder, especially the lives that take Ursula to Germany. I thought Atkinson's portrayal of domestic life among the Nazi elite was the book's high point. I also enjoyed the scenes set during the Blitz, and the appearances of a wandering killer.

If exploring the many different lives one woman might have lived between 1910 and the 1960s sounds interesting to you, by all means pick up Life after Life. The writing is fine and the elaborate scheme works much better than we have any right to expect.

Kiev Culture Metalwork

Two enameled brooches from the Kiev Culture that recently showed up at Timeline Auctions. The Kiev archaeological culture was located around the lower Dnieper River between about 200 and 500 CE.

And then this brooch and chain set.

The Reality of Insider Trading

Tyler Cowen summarizes some new research on insider trading, based on the cases of more than 600 convicted traders:

Some aspects come pretty close to what we see in the movies. The average insider trader is 43 years old, and nine out of 10 are male. The practice also seems correlated with some features of recklessness: Insider traders are younger than their associates, less likely to own real estate, and have fewer family members on average. More than half have criminal records, with almost all charges stemming from traffic violations.

To my eye, the most striking data involve personal connections: Insider traders appear to be pretty careful in choosing their accomplices. Of the known pairs of people who provide and act upon private information ("tipper and tippee"), 64 percent met before college, and 16 percent met in college or graduate school. Another 23 percent are family relations -- more siblings and parents than aunts and uncles, despite the added capital that the latter might have provided. Tips are also commonly shared among people with ethnically similar surnames: Of 24 tips coming from people with Celtic surnames, for example, 14 went to individuals who also had Celtic surnames.

The choice of accomplices demonstrates how hard it is to trust people you haven’t known very long, especially if you're not all that trustworthy yourself. It also implies that modern corporations are, in some ways, more honest places than one might think. Not that people are always so law-abiding; rather, many workplace relationships may be too superficial and too transient to develop the trust and cooperation typically required for villainy and law-breaking.

The median profiteer invested $200,000 and made a profit of $136,000 in 21 days. Nice money if you can get it, but hardly enough to retire on. On the other hand the mean profit was $2 million, which means that a few people really raked it in. And as Cowen points out, the biggest and smartest players may be harder to catch.

Sumerian Insults

Sumerian Language:

My personal favorite insults in Sumerian are agaashgi “most awkward person” and sangdu nutuku “idiot”, which literally means “not having a head”.

Egyptian Cobra Bead

Turquoise glass with stylized cobra band. New Kingdom, 1550-1070 BCE. From Timeline Auctions.

What are the President's Nuclear Powers?

Trying to scare people about Trump, Hillary and Obama have been harping on the chance that he might order a nuclear strike at somebody who pissed him off.

Which raises the question: can the president order a nuclear strike at, say, a nation that he thinks has sponsored a terrorist attack?

And the answer is that no outsider really knows:

Washington keeps details of the nuclear chain of command and its workings secret. The spokesman for the National Security Council, Ned Price, refused to say whether any other member of the chain of command could stop a presidential order to use nuclear weapons.

Although that hasn't kept various people from making the statement that this power resides entirely in the president:

“There’s no veto once the president has ordered a strike,” said Franklin C. Miller, a nuclear specialist who held White House and Defense Department posts for 31 years before leaving government service in 2005. “The president and only the president has the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons.”

Wikipedia, on the other hand, has this:

While the President does have unilateral authority as commander-in-chief to order that nuclear weapons be used for any reason at any time, the actual procedures and technical systems in place for authorizing the execution of a launch order requires a secondary confirmation under a two-man rule, as the President's order is subject to secondary confirmation by the Secretary of Defense. If the Secretary of Defense does not concur, then the President may in his sole discretion fire the Secretary. The Secretary of Defense has legal authority to approve the order, but cannot veto it. The Deputy Secretary of Defense would then assume the office of Acting Secretary of Defense in accordance with the Secretarial order of succession. An Acting Secretary would, likely, face the same test: to countersign the Presidential order or be relieved from office. This potential cycling of Acting Secretaries of Defense could be reminiscent of the so-called “Saturday Night Massacre” at the Department of Justice in 1973. (However, the Vice President and a majority of the heads of the Executive Departments could invoke section 4 of the Twenty-fifth amendment to the Constitution and have the President declared incapacitated. The Vice President would then become Acting President until the President submits a declaration to the Speaker of the House and the President pro tempore of the Senate that affirms his ability to discharge his duties.)

Interesting. Both of these descriptions may be correct, but they give very different pictures of how a nuclear attack would play out. I suppose the point of keeping the details of these arrangements secret was to keep the Soviets guessing, and prevent them from mucking up our nuclear response by kidnapping or assassinating the guy who keeps the other half of the code.

Back to the Times article:

In 1974, in the last days of the Watergate scandal, Mr. Nixon was drinking heavily and his aides saw what they feared was a growing emotional instability. His new secretary of defense, James R. Schlesinger, himself a hawkish Cold Warrior, instructed the military to divert any emergency orders — especially one involving nuclear weapons — to him or the secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger. It was a completely extralegal order, perhaps mutinous. But no one questioned it.

“Although Schlesinger’s order raised questions about who was actually in command,” Eric Schlosser writes in “Command and Control,” a 2013 book, “it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Two questions: as the Cold War fades into history, do we really need the state of hair-trigger alert we were on for so long? If the president still can launch a nuclear attack by himself, should we maybe think about changing that? Could Congress perhaps leave the president with the power to respond to a nuclear attack on America, but require that any first use of nuclear weapons get Congressional authorization?

And how can we, as a democracy, have a discussion about this if many relevant details are secret?

Bah to a Council of Historians

Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson have an op-ed in the Atlantic calling for the president to appoint a Council of Historians. Hey, he has a council of economists, so why not? Well, for one thing, one of the authors is Niall Ferguson, who knows a lot about history but so far as I can tell is wrong about everything in contemporary politics. For another, they dwell on how ignorant most presidents are about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I am on record as saying that the last thing the peace process needs is more dwelling on the past, and recommending that we find a mediator who knows nothing about the region at all.

They say things like this:

In 2003, to take one example, when President George W. Bush chose to topple Saddam Hussein, he did not appear to fully appreciate either the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims or the significance of the fact that Saddam’s regime was led by a Sunni minority that had suppressed the Shiite majority. He failed to heed warnings that the predictable consequence of his actions would be a Shiite-dominated Baghdad beholden to the Shiite champion in the Middle East—Iran.

Really? I was a vocal opponent of Bush's invasion and I read every argument against it I could put my hands on, and my memory is that "experts" disagreed vehemently about the significance of the Sunni-Shiite divide. Some thought it would explode, but others called that old-fashioned colonial thinking and said the more sophisticated people of Baghdad had moved beyond it. There absolutely was no consensus among Middle Eastern historians and other experts that deposing Saddam would lead to a worsening Sunni-Shiite conflict.

More:

Start with the issue that the president and his national-security team have been struggling with most: ISIS. Recent statements indicate that the administration tends to see ISIS as essentially a new version of al-Qaeda, and that a top goal of U.S. national-security policy is to decapitate it as al-Qaeda was decapitated with Osama bin Laden’s assassination. But history suggests that ISIS is quite different in structure from al-Qaeda and may even be a classic acephalous network. When we searched for historical analogues to ISIS, we came up with some 50 groups that were similarly brutal, fanatical, and purpose-driven, including the Bolsheviks of the Russian Revolution.

Interesting, but I posted here a completely different analysis of the historical analogs of the Islamic State that focused on anti-colonial revolts like that of the Mahdi in the Sudan. Maybe Allison and Ferguson's analogies are better, maybe not. Which historical events provide parallel cases to each other is one of the topics on which historians never agree.

An even worse problem with relying on advice from historians is that most of them are too ideological to be trustworthy. All social scientists have this weakness; as soon as partisan politics rears its head, they toss empiricism aside and start talking nonsense like the Laffer Curve. Actually that isn't fair, there are lots of issues on which most economists (and most historians, and even on a few issues most sociologists) agree because they are firmly founded in fact. But there is always somebody who disagrees. And since Presidents will generally take the advice they find most congenial, they can always find some expert to endorse their own preferences.

Obviously I think our policies would benefit from a proper understanding of history; I write about these issues all the time. I just don't really trust the historical profession to provide useful advice about the big problems facing us. We just don't agree on enough.

Americans Lose Faith in Each Other

This might be the year's most depressing poll. It shows that since 1997 the percentage of Americans who have confidence in the political wisdom of American voters has fallen from more than 60 percent to less than 35 percent. You can see that normally voters of the party in power have a bit more confidence, but right now the reverse is true.

This must have something to do with fear of Trump and his followers, but I suspect there is more; first, the generally bad mood of the country, and second, the sense among partisans of both the left and the right that they are losing.

The Frescoes of Santa Maria del Mur

One of the highlights of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is this marvelous 12th-century fresco from Catalonia. It shows Christ in majesty, surrounded by the symbols of the four evangelists, and then more saints below.

The fresco comes from a little village church called Santa Maria del Mur, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Just an ordinary place, where peasants and a few other folks worshiped. The church sold it to an art dealer in 1919, and he placed it on the market; the MFA bought it in 1921 for $92,000. As I said when I saw this, isn't it great for us that America had all those rich robber barons in the era when European churches were selling off their old art like crazy?

I especially like these conversing saints, who look so much like manuscript illustrations.

Tyler Cowen's Inconvenient Questions

Tyler Cowen has posted a series of what he calls "inconvenient questions" that I think are supposed to be a little shocking to liberals, or at least make us rethink our reflexive hatred of Trump. I will take them up one at a time:

Statement: I think it is more than appropriate and indeed imperative to raise and indeed investigate questions about the suspicious ties between the Trump candidacy and Putin’s Russia.

Question: Given what is now an extensive and proven history of Communist spies in the United States government from 1933 to 1945, was it also appropriate for Joseph McCarthy to raise such questions about (lower-level) political officers in his day? If you insinuate or make the charge outright that Trump and/or staff might be Russian agents on the basis of incomplete evidence, not yet demonstrated in a court of law, shall we downgrade you or upgrade McCarthy? Or both?

This one is easy: it was absolutely appropriate for the US government to look for Soviet spies in the 1950s, and in fact the FBI devoted a huge amount of effort to doing just that. The Soviets had lots of spies in America, including Klaus Fuchs, who gave them priceless atomic secrets.

But Joe McCarthy was not looking for Soviet spies. He was trying to ruin leftists by exposing their ties to the American Communist Party. I grant that the ACP was funded by Moscow and that its leaders were pro-Soviet, but thousand of people joined because they were desperately looking for some way to get out of the Depression. Many were, by 1950, anti-Soviet. McCarthy didn't care about such distinctions; he hated all Reds equally whether they were traitors or not. He also employed methods that would have made it impossible to prosecute many of the people he ruined. Because he didn't really care about that, he just cared about ruining their careers and elevating his own. THAT is the problem with McCarthy's witch hunt. Soviet spying was a real issue, but McCarthy was still an evil clown.

Statement: I think it is more than appropriate to raise questions about whether Trump’s rather cavalier attitude toward the U.S. Constitution disqualifies him from the Presidency on those grounds alone. I consider myself a fairly strict Constitutionalist, most of all for the Bill of Rights.

Question: Do you feel the same way about FDR’s court-packing scheme and internment of Japanese-Americans? Were the Democratic Congressmen — wasn’t that just about all of them? — who stood with FDR on the latter issue better or worse than Paul Ryan for standing with Trump today? If FDR had offsetting virtues as President, because he did in fact “get a lot done,” and you in general support him for that, are Trump supporters allowed to have a similar belief today about their candidate, viewing him in the lineage of FDR? On the basis of this one FDR data point, is it possible that presidential achievement is positively correlated with presidential oppression? Or is that sheer coincidence and all Trump supporters ought to believe as such?

Two responses to this: first, I don't really care that much about fidelity to the Constitution. I believe in Democracy, not government by a 230-year-old document. FDR was elected to help people in the Depression, and when the Supreme Court blocked some of his initiatives he tried to find a way around them. He failed. Yes, he had "authoritarian tendencies." But he did get a lot done, and furthermore his instincts were fundamentally democratic and just. That matters more than strict adherence to the Bill of Rights. Come to think of it, FDR faced a real test of his adherence to the Constitution in 1939-41, when he desperately wanted to get the US into the war against Hitler, but rather than just diving in or manufacturing some flimsy excuse, he waited for an actual attack on America and an actual vote of Congress.

Second, the Constitution assumes that in times of war and other emergencies the President will exercise extraordinary powers. That was part of why the post was created and vested with so much significance. Everyone at the Constitutional Convention knew that the executive power grows in wartime, which is why some of them were so opposed to wars and other "foreign entanglements." I think interning the Japanese Americans was wrong. But World War II was an event of unique awfulness in human history – 65 million dead, a 9-11 every 3 hours for 5 1/2 years – and carping about the way it was won is sort of in bad taste.

And no, none of this makes me feel any better about Trump. We are not in a crisis now, as we were in FDR's time; but Trump is trying to pretend that we are. While FDR's instincts were Democratic and just, Trump's are narcissistic and flighty. This is the key point: it is not just that Trump has spoken dismissively about the limits on presidential power, he has done nothing to show that the things he would like do to are worth doing, legally or not. I don't trust him.

Question: To paraphrase Bill Easterly, if you agree that defeating Trump is a national emergency, do you also think the Democrats should be compromising more on actual policies? Raise your left hand if you have come out and said this. See in addition Ross Douthat’s column.

This I think is a good question, but I don't really understand how "the Democrats" could do more of this than we already have by nominating Hillary. If the right response to this issue is to nominate an experienced moderate, we already did that. I personally know several Democrats who would have preferred Bernie but voted for Hillary because they were afraid Bernie would lose.

Douthat's column asks liberals to consider what they would do if the Democrats nominated a plainly unsuitable candidate but the Republicans had nominated Rick Santorum. Douthat is a Catholic social conservative who is not doctrinaire about taxes or economic policy but passionately hates abortion and has no use for gay or trans rights. The answer from Hillary about compromise on those issues is going to be "no." That is, she (like Obama) is willing to compromise on taxes and spending, and her foreign policy is likely to be very similar to what a moderate Republican would pursue, but she will fight for abortion and minority rights, the risk of Trump be damned.

Statement: During the 1930s, a large number of New Deal Democrats admired the fascism of Mussolini’s Italy, and less commonly but still sometimes Hitler’s Germany in its earlier years.

Question: Does this history cause you to have a more positive view of Trump and his supporters? Or do you instead significantly downgrade your sympathy for the Democrats of the New Deal era, now that you have lived through the Trump phenomenon? Does the Trump phenomenon now seem to you more in accord with traditional and historic American values? (I haven’t even mentioned slavery or race until now, nor Nagasaki nor Native Americans. And oh — did I mention that the New Deal coalition signed off on a lot of bigotry and segregation to keep the party together and get the core agenda through? Or how about the forcible repatriation of perhaps up to 2 million Mexicans, without due process of law, and many being American citizens, during the 1930s?)

No. Like most people who have read and thought a lot about 20th-century history, I have long pondered the meaning of Fascism and its place in human history. As I take it, the basic point of Fascism was to harness the astonishing energy and unity humans can achieve in wartime for the general advancement of the nation; or maybe just to achieve that level of unity and energy as a goal in itself. Some Fascists thought that the simplest way to do this was to start an actual war, but not all were so bellicose. Fascists also thought that a nation, like an army, functioned best when everyone followed one strong leader, and they called on everyone else to sacrifice self-interest for the nation. So once you have pondered Fascism you can catch echoes of it anytime people call for great national energy and unity – the War on Poverty, for example, or the Apollo program – or anytime some business guru goes off about leadership. In America, Republicans and Democrats have wasted a lot of words accusing each other of being Fascist, but the label does not really fit either party very well.

Trump is like a Fascist in putting himself forward as the one leader who can save the nation, in his obsession with making the nation great again, and in his contempt for manners, political correctness, and other rules about what can and should be done. But I don't consider these things bad because they are elements of Fascism. I consider leader worship and an obsession with national greatness bad on their merits. Other elements of Fascism, like a desire to build highways and airports and a deep concern for elderly war veterans, are good. So yes it is true that some of FDR's policies resembled those of Fascists, and that he admired their energy and unity. I think that is even more true of Teddy Roosevelt. So?

As for that list of bad things America has done, what is the point? Because the country has committed crimes, should we be blasé about committing them again? Yes, we have survived awful leadership before and we probably will again, but that doesn't make choosing awful leaders a good idea.

Final question(s): Would American history have taken a better or worse course if none of our Presidents had had significant authoritarian tendencies? Or do you insist that is the wrong question to ask, instead preferring to stress the issue of “our authoritarians” vs. “their authoritarians” and stressing the relative virtues of the former and the evils of the latter? And if that is indeed the case, do you now understand why Trump has come as far as he has?

I have never had any trouble understanding why Trump has come so far, so that question is moot for me. People vote their identities, and many Americans find that Trump stands up for who they are and what they believe in a way that nobody has in decades.

I consider authoritarianism a dangerous tendency, but really all political leaders sometimes do things that their opponents consider authoritarian. I think Trump's authoritarian tendencies are more dangerous than, say, Obama's because:

1) Trump seems to be a strange sort of narcissist with a weak relationship to reality; more than any other recent prominent American, Trump seems to think that he can make something so by saying it.
2) Trump is politically unmoored, with no obvious ideology or even plans beyond a vague lust for grandeur.
3) Trump has been publicly contemptuous of things I consider very important, such as freedom of the press;
4) Trump is an angry grudge holder who spends more time insulting people on Twitter than thinking about how to run the country;
5) Trump seems to admire dictators more than democratic leaders;
6) Trump gets into fights a lot. I hope that his responses to insults will be limited to words, but given his constant attacks on Obama for weakness I worry a little that he might start using cruise missiles.

America would survive Trump; I consider the notion that he is an existential threat to our democracy to be alarmist. But that is no reason to vote for him.

An Interesting Primary in Kansas

Tim Huelskamp, a Tea Party leader and Freedom Caucus member who was one of the sharpest thorns in the side of former speaker John Boehner, lost the primary in Kansas 1st district to obstetrician Roger Marshall. Marshall is a conservative but has pledged to work with the party leadership to get things done. While Huelskamp was backed by the Koch brothers, Marshall drew support from the Chamber of Commerce and all the agriculture interests. This strikes me as a positive development; our system can survive plenty of partisanship, but (as we have seen) if people can't eventually make some kind of deal things start to fall apart.

Beautiful Music

Another manuscript from the digital archives of Switzerland: Aarau, Aargauer Kantonsbibliothek, MsWettFm 2, f. 39r – Graduale oesa, Proprium de tempore, pars aestivalis

Details.

How are White Men Doing Economically?

Interesting graph put together by Kevin Drum. You can see that while every other group in America has seen their wages rise over the past 40 years – dramatically for women – the incomes of white men have gone nowhere. Family incomes have risen somewhat, but that is entirely because of women working more.

I usually think of this as meaning that since the 70s our economy has created many millions of new jobs rather than increasing the rewards for a smaller number of jobs; that to some extent we faced a choice between these two sorts of growth and it was more jobs that won out. It could also be that the wages of white men were inflated because in any mixed situation, it was almost always a white man who became the supervisor over black or female colleagues, so the possibility of the reverse happening shows up as declining wages for white men.

But whatever the reason, it is true that the wages of white men have gone either nowhere or down. White men really have lost power and status in America over the past 40 years, and that simple fact explains a lot of our politics.

Maya Funerary Urns at the MFA

Yesterday I took a wonderful trip to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with one of my old college friends. We spent most of our time in the ancient and classical galleries, gazing at Assyrian statues and Greek vases. I may post something on that later. But the thing that most blew me away was this display of Maya funerary urns at the entrance to their gallery of Native American art.

These are about four feet (1.2 m) tall, and the effect of these five bizarre visions side-by-side was overwhelmingly strange.

A sample. They actually have about ten of these, and you can see all of them at their web site. All of them come from the mountainous K'iche district of southern Guatemala; they would have been placed in caves or tombs. These probably come from caves. They date to the peak of Maya civilization, c. 650 to 800 CE.

Another interesting thing about these objects is that they were all donated by the same man, who had them in his private collection for years; imagine what his house was like. Perhaps he gave them away when he could no longer sleep without nightmares.

We were struck by this motif of the animal head emerging from another monster's mouth.

This is seriously freaky stuff, and I think intentionally so. Maya religion used shocking or horrific ceremonies and images to produce extremely strong emotions. Nothing sweet or soothing about their images of death.

Mass Execution in Ancient Athens

Athens:

Regional archaeological services director Stella Chryssoulaki of the Greek Ministry of Culture announced that archaeologists discovered two mass graves containing the lined-up skeletons of 80 men in an ancient cemetery at a construction site near Athens. The men are thought to have been young and healthy, due to the condition of their teeth. The hands of 36 of the men had been bound with iron. Some of them had been buried on their backs, while others were on their stomachs. Two vases found with the skeletons date to the mid seventh century B.C.

The archaeologists note that while these men seem to have been executed, they were buried with some degree of respect, in the Falyron Delta cemetery where other citizens were interred. So they were probably not ordinary criminals.

The seventh century was a time of great turmoil in Athens, as throughout Greece, so the reigning interpretation is these men were killed after losing out in civil strife. Perhaps they were supporters of the Olympic champion and would-be tyrant Cylon, who staged a coup attempt in 632. Our sources tell us that while Cylon escaped, many of his supporters were captured and killed.

I hope this interpretation works out, because I love it when archaeology and history align so neatly. It so rarely happens.

Yang Yu Tang

A few days ago I stumbled on this remarkable pen and ink drawing, attributed without explanation to a certain Yang Yu Tang. I saved it and resolved to look him up some time.

Sitting around yesterday morning, waiting for the rain to stop, I got my chance. Yu-tang Yang, to give his name in a more Chinese style, was born in northeastern China 1956. Many of his drawings document the landscape around Chung-chuen, where he grew up. (Autumn Sun)

He began drawing and painting at the age of nine. In 1972 he failed the examinations to enter art school, the first of several such failures. (Neighbor)

In 1975, after graduating from high school, he was sent to labor in the fields for a year. (Hsiung Soul)

In 1979, after failing again to enter art school, he resolved to train himself. Throughout the 1980s he supported himself with what he called a "nice, easy design job" (Autumn Sun)

In 1990 he began to practice the style that he calls "penart." He spent 1992 in Japan, studying Japanese drawing. (Reflection)

After his return to China in 1993 he quit that "nice, easy design job" and resolved to travel China, studying the people and landscape. All of these drawings date to after that time. (Snow Town)

By 2002 he was staging exhibits of his work. (Blue Mountain No. 6)

And these days he is famous enough that even I have heard of him. (Drizzle) More at the artist's web site.

Largest Known Footprint of a Carnivorous Dinosaur

Discovered by a tour guide in Bolivia. It measures 115 cm (4 feet) across and dates to around 70 million years ago. Best guess is that it was left by a member of the Abelisaurus genus, similar to Tyrannosaurs.