Obama's Optimism vs. a Crisis Mentality

Interesting article by Zack Beauchamp at Vox about the worldviews of Obama and Susan Rice, his National Security Adviser. While many Americans seem to worry that the world is falling apart, Obama and Rice believe that things have never been better. Rice:

This is a much more hopeful and positive period in history than we have seen certainly in our lifetimes. I tell my kids this: that they couldn’t be luckier to be living in this world at this time. . . .

We are in an era where, as the president has often said, if you didn’t know who you were going to be, or whether you were going to be male or female; white, black, Asian, Native American, Latino, [or] something else; if you didn’t know if you were going to be straight or gay — if you didn’t know anything about who you were going to be and you had to pick a time in which to be born. . . .

You would pick this time. Because the odds of success for any individual are much higher in the aggregate than they’ve ever been.

More people are free of poverty than ever before, conflict between states is less than ever before, technology is providing extraordinary opportunities for advancement, and health and agriculture and well-being. Compare the era we’re living in today to the losses we suffered in World War II or even in the Vietnam War, or compare the economic challenges we face now to the Great Depression.

As Beauchamp says, the numbers largely support this view:

The number of people living at $1.25 per day or less declined by roughly 1.1 billion people between 1990 and 2015. The number of war deaths per 100,000 people worldwide has increased in the past three years, owing largely to the war in Syria, but is still far lower than it was even 20 years ago. Average global life expectancy worldwide was 48 in 1950; it was 71.4 in 2015.

Since Obama and Rice believe that the world is generally trending in the right direction, their approach to foreign policy has been deeply conservative. Their main goal is to keep the boat from being rocked. They believe that things like the global free trade regime should be protected, because they are doing their job, and that we should not let little things like the terrorist bombings or the civil wars in Libya and Syria distract us from the broader mission of insuring peace and prosperity in the world. Beauchamp:

Contrast this with the Bush administration. After 9/11, the administration concluded the world wasn’t actually trending in a better direction. Jihadism threatened civilization itself, and a radical new approach was necessary to address the threat.

That means the Bush administration was willing try out more high-risk policies, like invading Iraq and attempting to transform it into a democracy at gunpoint. The Obama administration, because it thinks things are generally going well, can afford to be a bit more conservative. They don’t need to try to create utopias, because they think we’re on the road to one.

This can come across as callous, since the civil war in Syria is causing a lot of misery, and terrorists have many people terrified. But to Obama and Rice the main point is to make sure that our responses to those things don't just make things worse.

Violence in the Andes, 897 to 1370 CE

Tiffiny Tung, a bioarchaeologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, has studied skeletons from two large cemeteries in Peru. They date to the declining years of the Wari empire and the period of anarchy that came after it fell and before the rise of the Inca. She finds frightening levels of violence:

Even in their heyday, the Wari were no strangers to violence. In earlier work, Tung had studied their practice of decapitating captives from conquered communities to create mummified trophy heads. But as long as the empire was strong, the violence was ritualized and limited. From previous excavations, Tung found that in imperial Huari, only 20% of adult skulls had healed skull fractures, which are evidence of nonlethal head injuries, and barely any had suffered fatal wounds. During and immediately after the collapse, however, nearly 60% of adults of both sexes and 38% of children showed signs of nonlethal head injury.

Centuries later, life in Huari had gone from bad to worse. Rates of nonlethal head trauma hadn't changed much, but fatal injuries had skyrocketed. At the time of the collapse, only 10% of adults had died of a head injury, but now the rate of fatal head injury had risen to 40% among adults and 44% in children. "Violence becomes much more deadly," Tung said in her talk. "These violent deaths aren't from random outbreaks of community brawls. This is much more systematic, lethal violence, but it's unclear at this time if it's from civil war or warfare with those perceived as outsiders."

There was also evidence of malnutrition in the post-collapse period, and for a declining level of ritualistic concern for the dead.

I suppose the general take-away was that while life under a militant empire like the Wari was rough, life without them was even worse.

Individualism and American Life

This is Rod Dreher, reviewing a new book by Yuval Levin about America's contemporary malaise and the partisan gridlock it spawns:

What neither side can see is that they expect the impossible. Generally speaking, liberals want maximal individual liberty in personal life, especially on matters related to sexual expression, but demand more state involvement in the economy for the sake of equality. Conservatives desire maximal economic freedom but lament the social chaos and dysfunction—in particular, the collapse of the family among the poor and working classes—that afflict American society. The uncomfortable truth is that what each side loathes is the shadow side of what it loves.

As Alan Ehrenhalt pointed out in The Lost City, his 1995 book about Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, contemporary people lie to themselves about what things were like in the Golden Age. The thick social bonds and sense of community Americans enjoyed back then came at a significant cost—including cultural conformity and a lack of personal and consumer choice—that few of us today would tolerate. Ehrenhalt wrote that beginning in the 1960s, however, Americans embraced “the belief in individual choice and suspicion of any authority that might interfere with it.”

I consider this a fair description of what has happened since 1960: increasing personal and economic freedom, increasing inequality, weakened communities, rising alienation. But did it have to happen? And it is really true that we can't have a more equal economic system without recreating some form of tighter social control? That the loosening of repressive communities and the decline of patriarchal families has to lead to loneliness, anger, and the decline of the middle class?

I don't see why it has to. Levin and Dreher share a belief that America is on the whole worse off than it was in 1960, but I don't agree. If the decline of New Deal economics was the inevitable result of ending segregation, empowering women and protecting the environment, it was a price worth paying. It is certainly true that one side effect of increasing freedom has been the rise of libertarianism, but that doesn't mean we have to surrender to the libertarians on everything.

Most of the time I think it should be possible to create a new Democratic coalition built around fairness, using high taxes on the rich and major spending on infrastructure to mitigate the economic impact of globalization while still preserving personal liberty. And if not I still think it is worth trying.

Stubby Squid

Rossia pacifica, the stubby squid, recently photographed off California by a research vessel from the Monterey Aquarium.

Trump and the Rat Pack

John Podheretz locates Trump's personal style in the early 1960s era of the Rat Pack:

The Rat Pack made sleazy mob-run casinos seem glamorous — they danced and sang and gambled and drank and made “Ocean’s 11” in and around them — and what business more than any other drew Trump in during the 1980s? The casino business.

He may be vulgar, but it’s a formal kind of vulgarity. He is “Mr. Trump,” not “Donald.”

But it is the way he acts around women and talks about women that reflects this Rat Pack-ness more than anything else. The failed New York Times hit piece last weekend about his relations with women began with an anecdote about Trump hosting a pool party at his Mar-a-Lago estate resort and asking a 26 year-old model to put on a bikini. “That is a stunning Trump girl, isn’t it?” he declared, thus horrifying the New York Times — and puzzling the woman herself, Rowanne Brewer Lane, who was flattered by his attentions, went on to date him, and did not intend the anecdote she told the Times to be cast in a light disadvantageous to Trump. That pool party sounds like a Sinatra special in Palm Springs — or like a more sedate Playboy Mansion shindig, another favorite Trump locale.

Ross Douthat expands the idea, connecting Trump to JFK and Mad Men, suit-wearing avatars of male sexual liberation:

Much of what seems strange and reactionary about Trump is tied to what was normal to a certain kind of Sinatra and Mad Men-era man — the casual sexism, the odd mix of sleaziness and formality, even the insult-comic style.

But while that male culture was “conservative” in its exploitative attitudes toward women, it was itself in rebellion against bourgeois norms and Middle-American Christianity. And if Hillary is a (partial, given her complicated marriage) avatar of Gloria Steinem-era feminism, her opponent is an heir of the male revolutionary in whose club Steinem once went undercover: Hugh Hefner.

It was Hefner who fully embodied the male sexual revolt. Today he’s just a sleazy oldster, but in the beginning he was a faux philosopher, preaching a gospel cribbed from bohemia and various Freudian enemies of repression, in which the blessed pursuit of promiscuity was the human birthright. But really a male birthright, for a certain kind of man: The sort of hep cat who loved inviting the ladies back to his pad “for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”

It's a fascinating notion: that while Hillary's identity was largely fixed in the 70s world of leftish feminism, Trump's is a throwback to an era when he was just a teenager. In 1963 it was not at all surprising to be a suit-wearing rebel, a patriarch at home and a public advocate of women's liberation, a violent nationalist who dismisses most foreign entanglements, and a conservative Republican who stands up for coal, steel, cars, and the men who make them.

These days we tend to equate conservatism with religion, but as Trump's success shows many Americans are not nostalgic for small town virtue. They remember a world when men did what they wanted, moralism and the establishment be damned.

Clouds

Shot from the train last Friday. I see a wolf attacking a ram.

Real Education

Fredrik deBoer explains the difference between real college education and the fantasies of some reformers:

Here’s the model that the constant “online education will replace physical colleges” types advance: education is about gaining knowledge; knowledge is stored in the heads of teachers; schooling is the transfer of that knowledge from the teacher’s head to the student’s head; physical facilities are expensive, but online equivalents are cheap; therefore someone will build an Amazon that cuts out the overhead of the physical campus and connects students to teachers in the online space or, alternatively, cuts teachers out altogether and just transfers the information straight into the brains of the student.

The basic failure here is the basic model of transfer of information, like teachers are merchants who sell discrete products known as knowledge or skills. In fact education is far more a matter of labor, of teachers working to push that information into the heads of students, or more accurately, to compel students to push it into their own heads. And this work is fundamentally social, and requires human accountability, particularly for those who lack prerequisite skills.

I’ve said this before: if education was really about access to information, then anyone with a library card could have skipped college well before the internet. The idea that the internet suddenly made education obsolete because it freed information from being hidden away presumes that information was kept under lock and key. But, you know, books exist and are pretty cheap and they contain information. Yet if you have a class of undergraduates sit in a room for an hour twice a week with some chemistry textbooks, I can tell you that most of them aren’t going to learn a lot of chemistry. The printing press did not make teachers obsolete, and neither has the internet.

Some of those undergrads might learn chemistry. There are small numbers of people in the world who are really self-motivated to learn. I sometimes get people who ask me if they should get into the Great Courses or similar services. And I tend to tell them, well, since you’re self-motivated and you want to learn and you’re willing to invest, sure. The problem is that most people just aren’t built that way. There’s a romantic vision of education that’s very common to reformers – everybody’s an autodidact, deep down inside. But the truth is, most students aren’t self-motivated. Most students learn only under compulsion from society. True, everyone has subjects that they love, but everyone also has subjects that they hate, and the basic premise of a curriculum is that individuals cannot determine for themselves exactly what they need to learn. Meanwhile, many or most students try to escape these obligations, to varying degrees. Truancy law exists for a reason, and even in the ostensibly-voluntary world of the university, most students do what they can to avoid work as much as possible. I’m just trying to be real with you. Most people skip school when they can.

A Poem about Your University's Brand New Institute

The Office of the Provost has approved
A one-year planning grant
To establish the Eudaimonia Institute
For the Study of Human Flourishing
Under Capitalism.
We thought that we would do this while
You professors
Are away for the summer
So maybe you won’t notice.

“Eudaimonia” is Greek for “This university
Is run by corporate stooges
And is doomed.”
The term comes from Aristotle,
Which immediately legitimates the Institute
As totally not a joke.
We will be spending actual, real,
Non-Monopoly money to study “wellbeing,”
Which was a major interest of Aristotle’s
And central to his seminal work The Poetics.

The nature of #wellbeing is
Not yet fully understood,
But our initial research suggests
That it has something to do with
Yoga at sunset, baby koalas, and
Rooms filled with gold coins.
We seek to understand
The meaning of this term
And, in all likelihood,
To actually publish papers
On the subject
On our blog called
Education is Fine,
But Money Is Great.

James Smith, the Presidential Chair
In Business Ethics,
(Yes really)
Will serve as
Executive Director of the Institute
And will continue to serve
As Executive Director of
The university’s Named After A Bank Center
For the Study of Capitalism,
(Stop laughing)
Where students do not read
Whole, complete ancient Greek texts
But only the most important words from them. . . .

– Susan Harlan

More here

Annals of Military Intelligence

Reading a new book on the intelligence services of World War II, on which more to come. Meanwhile, here is this:

After Japan's defeat Col. Shinobu Takayam of the army's Operations Department acknowledged ruefully that it would have been prudent to research America's actual and potential warmaking powers before embarking on a conflict with it.

We're Not Going to Run Out of Fresh Water

Israel now gets 55% of its fresh water from desalination, and it has gone in a decade from a water crisis to a water surplus that it is marketing to neighbors:

In 2008, Israel teetered on the edge of catastrophe. A decade-long drought had scorched the Fertile Crescent, and Israel’s largest source of freshwater, the Sea of Galilee, had dropped to within inches of the “black line” at which irreversible salt infiltration would flood the lake and ruin it forever. Water restrictions were imposed, and many farmers lost a year’s crops. Their counterparts in Syria fared much worse. As the drought intensified and the water table plunged, Syria’s farmers chased it, drilling wells 100, 200, then 500 meters (300, 700, then 1,600 feet) down in a literal race to the bottom. Eventually, the wells ran dry and Syria’s farmland collapsed in an epic dust storm. More than a million farmers joined massive shantytowns on the outskirts of Aleppo, Homs, Damascus and other cities in a futile attempt to find work and purpose.

Some people think this agricultural crisis was the real root of the Syrian uprising.

But the crisis has eased in Israel. Part of the solution was in requiring people to be more efficient about using water, especially farmers:

The Israeli government began by making huge cuts in the annual water quotas for farmers, ending decades of extravagant overuse of heavily subsidized water for agriculture. . . . Israel has, in the meantime, become the world leader in recycling and reusing wastewater for agriculture. It treats 86 percent of its domestic wastewater and recycles it for agricultural use — about 55 percent of the total water used for agriculture. Spain is second to Israel, recycling 17 percent of its effluent, while the United States recycles just 1 percent 

California, are you listening?

But even with all of this rationing and re-use, Israel still did not have enough water for its needs. So Israeli engineers attacked desalination on a broad front, using dozens of innovations and sheer scale to make reverse osmosis desalination far more affordable:

Inside Sorek, 50,000 membranes enclosed in vertical white cylinders, each 4 feet high and 16 inches wide, are whirring like jet engines. The whole thing feels like a throbbing spaceship about to blast off. The cylinders contain sheets of plastic membranes wrapped around a central pipe, and the membranes are stippled with pores less than a hundredth the diameter of a human hair. Water shoots into the cylinders at a pressure of 70 atmospheres and is pushed through the membranes, while the remaining brine is returned to the sea.

Desalination used to be an expensive energy hog, but the kind of advanced technologies being employed at Sorek have been a game changer. Water produced by desalination costs just a third of what it did in the 1990s. Sorek can produce a thousand liters of drinking water for 58 cents. Israeli households pay about US$30 a month for their water — similar to households in most U.S. cities, and far less than Las Vegas (US$47) or Los Angeles (US$58).

The combination of improved desalination and cheap solar power (deserts have lots of sunshine) means that any coastal area can solve its water problems whenever the people decide to.

Post Mortem on the Ellicott City Storm of July 30

The National Weather Service has a page up on the "historic" (their word) storm of July 30. There is an automated rain gauge at the county service building in Ellicott City, and it recorded 6.6 inches of rain that night. 2.04 inches of that rain fell in the first 15 minutes, which is about as fast as rain ever falls, and 4.56 inches in the first hour. It was that extremely intense burst of rain that generated the dangerous flooding; the water simply fell faster than creeks and sewers could carry it away, and since the area is hilly the rest went rampaging downhill in whatever way it could. The map above shows the storm's 40-mile path; dark red represents more than 6 inches of rain.

Data from the flood gauge in the Patapsco at Ellicott City. Even though the rain fell over a small area, just a fraction of the Patapsco's basin, it was still so intense that it generated a severe flood in the river, which rose 13 feet in 90 minutes. This was a thousand-year storm, that is, chance of such a storm striking our area is less then 0.1 percent per year.

My first post on the storm is here.

Javier Eduardo Alvarez, Cypresses at Lake Camécuaro, Mexico

From National Geographic.

Gender and Marriage in the Faroes

Tyler Cowen reports that many young women leave the Faroe Islands to study and never come back:

There are already 2,000 more men than women on the Faroes – which has a total population of just under 50,000 – and some of those men have taken matters into their own hands by importing wives and companions from the Philippines and Thailand.

Filipinos and Thais make up two of the largest groups of foreigners on the Faroe Islands . There are now 200 Thais and Filipinos – mostly women – spread out over the islands. In the tiny hamlet of Klaksvík located in the northern part of the islands, there are already 15 women from Asia.

Bjarni Ziska Dahl, who married his Filipino wife in 2010, said that the foreign women could well be the answer to the issues facing the Faros. “We must recognise that there is a problem, and welcome these strangers with dignity,” Dahl told DR Nyheder. “We need these people.”

Both Dahl and his wife Che said that they have a lot in common: island life, a dedication to family and a longing for simplicity. Dahl said that Asian woman are often willing to take jobs that Faroese women will not do.

We have had local gender disparities for centuries, mostly because of men leaving home to find work. Now many rural areas and small towns are seeing women leave for office jobs in the big city.

The attraction of men and women to different kinds of work, and the different geographic distributions of the work they prefer, is just another of the myriad social problems we are dealing with in the globalized, post-patriarchal age.

Circular Time, or, Alternative Medicine against the Scientific Establishment, Again

I just opened one of the copies of the TLS that I picked up from my mother in Massachusetts last week, and read this:

Practices that are based on the belief that the mind has the power to influence our physical body, its ability to heal and its capacity to guard itself more effectively against disease, have for a long time been dismissed as pseudo-science. Until recently, claims that ancient traditions such as meditation may offer powerful physical and psychological benefits, have been disdained as esoteric nonsense, and shown to be based on false physiological assumptions.

Partly, this dismissal of mind-body relations can be put down to the still powerful Cartesian legacy: in the seventeenth century, Descartes established the mind and the body as radically separate entities, and a dualistic view of matter and spirit has dominated Western philosophy and medicine ever since. . .

Recently, however, as Jo Marchant shows in her thought-provoking book Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind over Body, a considerable number of medical researchers have begun to investigate the efficacy of a range of mind-body based cures. . . .

At which point I threw up my hands and stopped reading. Those words could have been written at any time during my life, and probably for decades before I was born. I have been reading versions of them since the 1970s, almost identical one to the next.

The ancients liked to think that all of their knowledge was ancient or even eternal; we, by contrast, love to believe that all of our knowledge is new. Anyone who stopped to think about the question for ten seconds ought to realize that of course in the 1960s there were millions of people fascinated by meditation and other Eastern spiritual practices, including hippie doctors and scientists who tried to devise scientific tests of them. And yet every year somebody comes out with another book arguing that this is all new. It's maddening.

One of the few really useful tools I picked up in graduate school was the concept of discourse. Seen in this way, a civilization is not so much a set of beliefs as a conversation, or even an argument. It is not agreement that defines a culture, but the things we like to disagree about.

In the Middle Ages, people who pondered politics in a theoretical way all thought it was crucial to determine whether the political or spiritual power ought to be on top. They had every shade of answer to this question from "the emperor ought to be the pope's errand boy" to "the pope ought to be the emperor's chaplain," but they all considered it a vital and interesting question. Today we think the relationship between the government and the economy is crucial. We hold every sort of opinion from libertarianism to socialism, but you would be hard put to find a modern political thinker who does not consider the question important. These are the conversations, the arguments, that define our civilizations.

Modern medicine is not a belief in science-based practice. Modern medicine is a conversation about the proper roles of science-based physical or chemical interventions vs. a more holistic or spiritual view of health. This conversation has been going on for at least 150 years. Physicians and scientists have taken every possible position within this discourse, from "everything but drugs and surgery is poppycock" to "the medical establishment is out to kill or enslave you." (Thomas Szasz, remember, is a physician.) My impression is that these days the research establishment generally pursues reductive science, but on the other hand many and perhaps most practicing physicians take mind-body interactions very seriously, and they tend to practice more according to what they see in their patients than what they read.

Book like Cure are just sallies in this ongoing debate, and they are "new" only in the sense that the next line in a conversation is new. I understand why authors and publishers try to present them as new, but the editors at the TLS ought to know better.

The Names of the Snake Dynasty

From about 560 to 690 CE, the Maya world was dominated by a dynasty of kings who called themselves the Snakes; that's their emblem glyph above, sort of like their coat of arms. From their power base in Calakmul they defeated the previous hegemons from Tikal and made themselves masters of the region. The names of their most important rulers were, in order:

Stone Hand Jaguar
Sky Witness
Scroll Serpent
Shaker of Cities
Claw of Fire

In about 695 they were defeated by a new king of a resurgent Tikal, God That Clears the Sky, and faded away, their power broken. More here.

Masks from the royal tombs of Calakmul.

Left-Handed Penmanship Contests for Civil War Amputees

Charming story from the Library of Congress, via the Vault:

This eight-page handwritten letter by Private Franklin H. Durrah describes his service as a private in the Union Army during the Civil War, which ended with the loss of his right arm. The letter’s neat cursive—and the story it tells—is part of a collection of entries into left-handed penmanship contests for disabled veterans, recently digitized by the Library of Congress. The William Oland Bourne Papers holds nearly 300 letters, photographs, and various recollections, offering an unprecedented look at the stories of heavily wounded soldiers.

Bourne, a chaplain at New York’s Central Park Hospital, used his newspaper The Soldier’s Friend to conduct a penmanship contest for veterans who had lost their right (writing) arm in the Civil War. Bourne offered prize money for the best writing ($1,000 total for the 1866 competition); he hoped that showcasing the winner’s penmanship despite their disability would lead to their future employment. “Penmanship,” The Soldier’s Friend wrote, “is a necessary requisite to any man who wants a situation under the government, or in almost any business establishment.” To enter, contestants were asked to write a letter using their left hand that detailed their service and injury, and, if possible, include a photograph. All told, the collection holds entries for two years of Bourne’s contests, which provide a rare soldier’s-eye-view of combat and recovery.

An American Moment

At the Olympics, the US/Rainbow Coalition women's gymnastics team of Simone Biles, Laurie Hernandez, Aly Raisman, Gabby Douglas and Madison Kocian celebrate their gold medal.

Gravity Payments and the $70,000 Minimum Wage Experiment

You may recall that more than a year ago Dan Price, the CEO and founder of Gravity Payments, decided to cut his own salary and raise the minimum wage for all his employees to $70,000 a year. This may have been largely a publicity stunt, but hey, if companies want to get publicity with this kind of stunt, that's fine with me.

Since then, the company has remained profitable and turnover among employees is down. According to surveys, the employees are more satisfied with their jobs. Their commuting times are also down by an average of 6 minutes, apparently because some used the new money to get new digs closer to where they work. One of the weirder effects is a small baby boom: in previous years no more than two Gravity Payments employees have had babies, but this year it is ten.

The baby boom is I would guess a product of a windfall effect. In general terms salaries have little impact on fertility rates, and the effect they have is negative. Of course it is hard to disentangle wages from age and other confounders, but as best we can tell people on higher salary tracks don't have more children than people on lower tracks. But maybe giving people an extra $25,000 a year all at once makes them feel so flush that they look around and ask what else they want in life.

The conundrum about money and babies is interesting. If you ask Americans why they don't have more children, many say because it is so expensive. Economics professors whose essays I have read on this subject say their students all offer this reasoning, suggesting that if childcare and college were free people would have more children. But the overall data do not bear this out, since poor people have more kids. (Or at least no fewer; again, the statistics are complicated.) Middle class people think children are expensive because they have ideas about what children ought to have (their own bedrooms, new clothes, violin lessons, math camp) that cost money. It is perfectly possible to raise children without any of these expenses, and the experience of first-generation immigrants shows that lacking those things doesn't keep smart kids from getting ahead. A better way to look at the numbers is to say that people have ideas about what life is supposed to be like, which depend on their social class, and those include ideas about what children's lives should be like. So the higher your social class, the more it costs to raise children in a way that seems right to you. Ergo, just a slow rise in salary doesn't make child raising more affordable, since it also raises your ideas about what your family's life should be like. But a sudden, dramatic rise in your income might lead to a different calculus.

The Black Hours of the Morgan Library

This manuscript, made in Belgium around 1480, is one of a small group of Books of Hours painted onto pages that had been dyed black. It is now in the Morgan Library in New York, MS M.493.

Fox News Creepy

Another former Fox News celebrity has stepped forward with allegations against Roger Ailes. This time it's Andrea Tantaros:

In an interview, Ms. Tantaros, a former daytime host, said that the former chairman, in one-on-one meetings, complimented her figure, asked questions about her dating life and requested a hug, making her uncomfortable.

I don't want to dismiss that, because it is absolutely not something women should have to put up with at work. But it makes Ailes seem more like a pathetic schmuck than a dangerous predator. Compare him to Bill Cosby, for heaven's sake. These stories make me wonder if the female hosts at Fox talked about him behind his back and made up insulting nicknames for him.

There does seem to have been at least one woman who didn't run from Ailes. That was Laurie Luhn, whose sordid story you can read at New York Magazine:

So far, most of the women who have spoken publicly about harassment by Ailes in the wake of Gretchen Carlson’s lawsuit had said no to Ailes’s sexual advances. They ran out of hotel rooms, they pulled away from embraces, they complained or avoided or generally resisted, even when it hurt their careers. This is the account of a woman who chose to go along with what Roger Ailes wanted — because he was powerful, because she thought he could help her advance her career, because she was professionally adrift and emotionally unmoored.

So maybe Ailes was always on the lookout for another adrift and unmoored woman he could bully. But he was just no match for the tough, beautiful women he hired for his news operation. He could hug them and make them wear skirts, but he never seems to have gotten any further.

The Islamic State Loses its Libyan Stronghold

Pro-government Libyan militias have taken the city of Surt from the Islamic State, after a battle that began in early June. This pretty much eliminates IS-held territory in Libya. The IS had hoped to make Surt into "Raqqa on the Mediterranean," and at one point they controlled the coastline for 150 miles around the city. Now they have no territory left in Africa. The main anti-IS fighting force was the militia from Misurata, which for some reason has been the most effective fighting force in Libya since the civil war began. US and British special forces supported the offensive from the beginning, and it final stage was assisted by a handful of US bombing attacks on heavily fortified buildings in the city center.

Two teenage boys interviewed by the Times said life in the city had been awful:

“Life was hell,” said Hammad, a lanky 16-year-old with a shock of unkempt hair, describing the Islamic State’s brutal 18-month rule. Cafes were closed, schools renamed and girls flogged for not covering their faces, he said. He watched in horror as a hooded figure chopped off the hand of a thief — a desperate man who had stolen medicine. Nightmares came after the Islamists crucified people accused of crimes at a major traffic junction, then left their bodies to rot.

“I would wake in a panic, thinking I was suffocating,” he said. His brother Mohammed, 19, nodded in agreement. The Islamists had executed his friend Abdullah by pushing him from a tall building, accusing him of blasphemy. Abdullah was 15 years old, Mohammed said.

I think this counts as a victory for civilization. Libya remains a catastrophic mess, its "unity government" blessed with no unity and not much to govern, but at least it won't become a caliphate of slavery and torture.

Human Sacrifice on Mount Lykaion

Interesting news from Greece:

Archaeologists in Greece have made a sinister discovery on a southern mountain top dedicated to the ancient god Zeus, which might corroborate one of the darkest Greek legends.

The Culture Ministry said Wednesday that an excavation of a mound on Mount Lykaion, made of the ashes of animals sacrificed for more than a thousand years to the chief of the Greek gods, also uncovered a 3,000-year-old skeleton of a teenager.

The find in the southern Peloponnese region dates to the 11th century B.C.

That was the end of the Mycenaean era, whose heroes were immortalized in Greek myth and Homer's epics, and many of whose palaces still stand.

Ancient writers linked Mount Lykaion with human sacrifice, a practice which has very rarely been confirmed by archaeologists in the Greek world.

But actually the boy's skeleton was found in a proper grave, so calling him a victim of human sacrifice is a wild surmisal, even if the grave was at the bottom of the pile of sacrificial ashes.

But the legend is awesome; according to our accounts, a human victim was killed and a meal prepared with one human serving and the rest animal; whoever got the human meat and tasted it would become a wolf for nine years.

Other sources say there were no shadows within the sacred precinct on the mountain, and that any non-priest who entered would be dead within the year.

Frank Frazetta's Paperback Covers are Worth Big Bucks

This original painting by Frank Frazetta, At the Earth's Core, was done for the cover of some sleazy fantasy novel in 1974. It just sold at auction for $1,075,500, a record for Frazetta's work.

I wouldn't even call it one of his better covers; imagine what these might sell for.

Or one of these original Conan covers.

The Omen

I drove down to Washington today because I had an afternoon meeting in the suburbs. When I was just two blocks from my office, sitting at a light, a crow flew across the street about ten feet in front of me. When it was right in front of my car it dropped one of its large, primary wing feathers. The feather spiraled lazily down the street, spinning. On one side it looked all black, but on the other I could clearly see the white central rib, black alternating with black and white as it turned.

I thought, if I were a Roman I would turn around and go back to bed.

Establishmentarians for Hillary

The list of Republican establishment types supporting Hillary grows. On Monday we had a letter from 50 foreign policy officials:

Fifty of the nation’s most senior Republican national security officials, many of them former top aides or cabinet members for President George W. Bush, have signed a letter declaring that Donald J. Trump “lacks the character, values and experience” to be president and “would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”

Mr. Trump, the officials warn, “would be the most reckless president in American history.”

And now this from two former Republican directors of the EPA:

Donald Trump has shown a profound ignorance of science and of the public health issues embodied in our environmental laws,” William Ruckelshaus, who served as the EPA administrator under Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and William Reilly, who served under President George H.W. Bush, said in a joint statement. “He hasn’t a clue about Republicans’ historic contributions to science-driven environmental policy.”

I'm not sure what the upshot of this drumbeat of endorsements will be. It plays directly to Hillary's own strategy, which is to position herself as the sane, responsible, inclusive candidate, in contrast to that raging racist madman Trump.

On the other hand it also plays directly to Trump's strategy, which is to position himself as a change agent who terrifies the elite because he will shake up their world.

My general feeling about Americans is that they are fundamentally a conservative bunch, in the sense of not really wanting radical change no matter what they sometimes say. They need constant reassurance that things will turn out ok. So I think Hillary probably has the winning hand. But it does make me a little nervous to see all these old men in expensive suits lining up to endorse her, especially since some of them have bad mistakes in their pasts like lobbying for the invasion of Iraq.

Medicaid Expansion and the Health of Poor People

How much health insurance improves the health of poor Americans is much disputed, but here is a new study for the plus side:

Researchers surveyed nearly 9,000 low-income adults in three states that made different choices with respect to Medicaid expansion: Kentucky, which expanded Medicaid eligibility to include more low-income adults; Arkansas, which used federal funding to purchase private plans for low-income adults; and Texas, which chose not to expand Medicaid at all. By 2015, two years after coverage expansion, low-income adults in Kentucky and Arkansas received more primary and preventive care, visited emergency departments less often, and reported better health than their counterparts in Texas.

Thor's Helmet

Hubble photo. The basic structure is a bubble nebula, thrown out by the supergiant star in the middle, interacting with a surrounding cloud of gas and dust.

A More Interesting Election

Love this side-by-side comparison of polling in 2012 and this year, via Josh Marshall. The Obama vs. Romney election was in some senses the perfect presidential contest: both were impressive, experienced, scandal-free candidates, highly regarded in their own parties. Both were well known to voters. Both are also very predictable men, and during the campaign neither did anything remotely surprising. The result was an almost unchanging poll line, showing Obama with a slight advantage pretty much through the whole year. (Romney surged to a brief tie after the first debate.) I have read that Obama's internal polling showed an absolutely unchanging 2 point lead for him through the entire campaign. That seems to be where America is right now, given fairly generic liberal and conservative candidates.

And now 2016. This year we have two candidates who are both despised by large groups within their own parties, with long records of scandal, one of whom does crazy stuff on a regular basis. The result is numbers that veer all over the place, giving us the possibility that Clinton might win in a blowout, or that Trump might defy the odds and win a narrow victory, or anything in between. I don't think we'll know for sure until after the last debate in October.

Hey, at least it's interesting.

Indians, Freedom, Community, Etc.

David Brooks has been pondering an old question we inherited from our colonial ancestors:

In 18th-century America, colonial society and Native American society sat side by side. The former was buddingly commercial; the latter was communal and tribal. As time went by, the settlers from Europe noticed something: No Indians were defecting to join colonial society, but many whites were defecting to live in the Native American one.

This struck them as strange. Colonial society was richer and more advanced. And yet people were voting with their feet the other way.

The colonials occasionally tried to welcome Native American children into their midst, but they couldn’t persuade them to stay. Benjamin Franklin observed the phenomenon in 1753, writing, “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.”

During the wars with the Indians, many European settlers were taken prisoner and held within Indian tribes. After a while, they had plenty of chances to escape and return, and yet they did not. In fact, when they were “rescued,” they fled and hid from their rescuers.

Brooks leaps immediate from this 250-year-old observation to the contemporary world, writing that this history

raises the possibility that our culture is built on some fundamental error about what makes people happy and fulfilled.

I think there is something to this, but before I get into that I want to make a few caveats. First, it is not true that no Indians copied the white man's ways. There were Cherokee, Creeks and others in the "civilized tribes" who built log cabins, farmed with plows, wore clothes no matter the temperature, developed alphabets, published newspapers, even owned African slaves. Plus all of those free, anti-colonial Indians rapidly took on some of the white man's best gadgets, especially guns, metal knives and hatchets, iron cauldrons, and strike-a-lights for starting fires. These things made their lives easier. (Just try to light a fire by spinning a stick in a hole some time.) Even more important, the Indians we are talking about lived in a world depopulated by waves of European diseases. Our evidence suggests that back in 1500 or so some Indians lived as what amounted to the serfs of mound-building warlords, their bones weakened by the lack of protein in their mostly corn diets. So part of what we are talking about is not an Indian world so much as one in which there is a lot of freedom because 90 percent of the people have recently died.

Second, our society is not the same as that of eighteenth-century Massachusetts. We have discarded some parts of it that may have loomed large for runaways: gloomy, repressive Calvinism, uncomfortable wool clothes even in the summer, a dismal bread and meat diet, a strict legal code developed for crowded, European societies enforced with draconian punishments by magistrates who equated the old law with civilization, whether it made any sense in America or not. Many of the runaways were indentured servants who labored in effective slavery, under masters who beat them casually and sometimes employed dirty tricks to keep them serving past their seven-year terms.

And, most people did not run away to join the Indians.

But all of that being said, the records make it clear that many Europeans much preferred life among the wild Indians to life in the colonies.

Why? Brooks places the stress on community: Indians lived in tight-knit villages or bands where life was lived as a group, and Brooks is convinced that this is both what the runaways were looking for and what we miss. I am not so sure. For one thing a 17th-century New England village was a much tighter community than anything we know in 21st-century America, especially for religious believers. For another, Indian life in the vast, nearly empty woods of a de-populated North America was less communal than he lets on. One of his sources says that Indians may never have been alone, which is poppycock. Our accounts speak of lone Indians all the time. Indian were sometimes alone when they hunted, gathered, collected mussels, or just walked in the woods. Religious rites like those we now call the vision quest were common, requiring young men to spend weeks alone in the forest. One of the wonders of Indian life to Europeans, recounted dozens of times, was the sight of a young Indian woman giving birth alone in the forest. (Nobody really knows what to make of these stories; it may have been the female equivalent of the vision question initiation for boys.)

I would emphasize other things about Indian society, and I would start with work. Indians were always mocking Europeans for how hard they worked, demanding to know what they got for their ten hours a day of toil. Indians worked hard at certain seasons of the year, for example at corn planting time and when the fish were running in the rivers. At other times, especially in the winter, they lay around doing next to nothing for weeks at a time. When Indians did work hard – Brooks may be right here – it was often a communal activity. Fish runs and corn harvests were festive occasions in which the whole village worked together. When women worked in the gardens or ground grain, they did it in groups, their babies strapped to their chests and their children around them. When my sons and their friends take jobs, this means leaving their friends behind to spend hours a day with strangers, and this is one of the main reasons they don't want to work. If they could all work together, they would like that much better. So I would say that one of the big attractions of Indian society was that 1) they didn't work very hard, and 2) the work they did was integrated with the rest of their lives.

So, yes, Indians were less materialistic than we are, and enjoyed life in small communities. As Brooks complains, the richer we get, the more we wall ourselves off from other people in big houses with big yards, and I agree that this is self-defeating. But to me what drives all of these social changes is our economy and the technology that underpins it, the whole world of machines and offices and careers and jobs. How to get away from that is a very daunting question indeed.

A Neoliberal Manifesto

Sam Bowman is a proud neoliberal. To him this means that he is pro-market, pro-welfare, and against dogma. Let me focus on three points from his manifesto:

We like markets — a lot. We think that markets are by far the best way of organising most human affairs that involve scarce resources, because they align people’s incentives in ways that communicate where resources can be be used most efficiently, and give people reasons to come up with new ways of using existing resources. This means that markets and market-like systems are desirable in many, many places they’re not present at the moment — healthcare, education, environmental policy, organ allocations, traffic congestion, land-use planning.

We are liberal consequentialists. A system is justified if it is the one that best allows people to live the lives that they want to live, or makes them happiest or more satisfied than any other. There are no inherent rights that override this. People’s wellbeing is all that matters, and generally individuals are best at defining what is best for themselves.

We care about the poor. Caring about people’s wellbeing leads us to caring about the worst off people. Usually an extra £100 makes a pauper better off than it makes a millionaire. This diminishing marginal utility means that poor people’s lives are the easiest to improve for a given amount of time, energy and money.

I agree with much of this, especially the middle paragraph. To me the only standard that counts in political economy is enabling people to live good lives. I also think capitalism works great in many areas, and I care about the poor.

But the devil is in the details. It's one thing to say that you believe in free markets and helping the poor, but how do you do those things together? High taxes, I suppose, although Bowman never comes out and says so. Consider health care. Bowman is British, and many pro-capitalist Brits love to complain about their socialist health care system. But it works every bit as well as the pro-market US system at around half the cost, so why would anybody want to mess with that? Using markets to improve education is an idea that has been around for my whole lifetime, but making it work has proved extremely difficult. Even where it does work (in the sense of raising test scores) it undermines the community solidarity that comes from having everybody going to the same school, which for many people cuts into that sense of wellbeing that Bowman says should be the overriding goal.

I would also quibble with this claim:

We base our beliefs on empirics, not principles. There is an unlimited number of stories that you can tell about the world, but only a few are true. You find out which are true by comparing the stories to reality with experiments and throwing away the ones that don’t fit. It doesn’t matter if a theory appears to be internally coherent — if it can’t stand up to experimentation, it’s wrong. In particular, quantitative empirical research is what we look for.

Sure, everybody likes empirical data. But what time scale are we talking about? Should we be focused on things that seem to work over a five-year time frame? Or should we be thinking in terms of decades, or even centuries? This, after all, is the moral conservative's response to all the social changes that have happened since 1960: they may seem like fun for a while but the long-term consequences will be dire. How can we possibly have the data to determine whether something genuinely new (widespread sex change operations, say) will have good or bad effects over fifty years? We can't, so on this one as on hundreds of other major changes we are just going with our guts. Or the question I raised yesterday, about banning robot trucks; how can we predict the long-term effects, or weigh improved efficiency vs. the blow that will fall on a million men?

A broad-brush sketch of my politics would look much like Bowman's: markets when they work, government intervention when they don't, a focus on helping the mass of people lead decent lives. But I haven't published any manifestos because I am not nearly so confident that I have any particular answers to the hard problems of our world.