Jim Geraghty, Not Liking his Presidential Choices

Jim Geraghty has a new piece at the National Review titled "The Media Have Forgotten Why They Exist." In it he complains that rather than doing the hard work of laying out what the candidates stand for, most of the media is just cheerleading for their own side. I agree completely, but I see perfectly well why. They do this because 90 percent of the country has already made up their minds about how they are going to vote, including 95 percent of the people who read the news. So cheerleading is a much better business model than analysis.

Anyway, Geraghty asks whether Trump is even trying to win.

If, in his press conference last week, Trump had wanted to take down Kamala Harris, he could have spoken at length about her past declaration that “an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal”; her support for decriminalizing currently illegal crossings; her belief that illegal immigrants deserve free health care; her claim that Donald Trump “manufactured” a “so-called crisis” regarding illegal immigration; her contention that a border wall is “wasteful”; her support for reparations for slavery; her support for [long list of tax increases]; her desire to restore and expand the Iranian nuclear deal; her openness to an arms embargo against Israel; her vague positions on many issues relating to China; her rejection of preemptive sanctions against Russia before the invasion of Ukraine; her longtime support for taxpayer funding for abortion, etc. 

Instead, Trump rambles.

He’s a 78-year-old man who doesn’t bother to read or listen to his briefers, can’t remember details, and can’t be bothered to try. As with his convention speech, Trump just goes out there and wings it and trusts his gut, offering meandering, half-recalled stories that come across as incoherent gobbledygook to the voters he needs to persuade. The comments section below will be aflame with furious cries that I am a Trump “hater,” and that if I somehow closed my eyes and pretended that Trump was an effective communicator, then the Republicans would win the election. Much like the candidate they adore, Trump’s fanbase is full of whiners always offering excuses and blame-shifting, marinating in a victimhood-obsessed way of looking at the world, a dead-end street in which everything is so unfair and no one has any agency. Trump could run a much better, much more persuasive, and much more effective campaign with much better chances of victory if he wanted to do so. He just isn’t willing to put in the work.

I appreciated this:

Harris’s thought process when speaking extemporaneously is an M. C. Escher painting, doubling back on itself; Trump’s is Jackson Pollock, careening and expanding in all directions, leaving a mess.

I'm going to vote for Harris, but she was my least favorite of all the Democratic contenders in 2020, and I won't pretend to be happy about it. 

Ukrainian Offensive Update

The main thing to say is that the situation is very confusing and nobody really knows much. The Ukrainians have kept very quiet and issued no statements of their own, so all our sources are Russian. We are getting information from Russian bloggers, including geolocated images of fighting, but they keep squabbling with each other about what is happening, accusing each other of "alarmism" or "foolish optimism."

As of Monday morning, Ukraine seems to be in full control of Sudzha, a town of about 5,000. Ukrainian forces have been spotted in many villages across 700 square kilometers of Kursk oblast, but some of them are far-ranging commando or reconnaissance groups, and nobody knows how much of the area is really under Ukrainian control. However, there are significant main line forces involved as well, including battalions from Ukraine's best mechanized and air assault brigades. [Update 12 August: Ukraine's chief of staff says Ukraine "controls" 1,000 square kilometers of Kurst oblast.]

Thanks in part to those wide-ranging commando units, Russian forces rushing to the combat zone have been ambushed or attacked with missiles, leading to hundreds of casualities. (here, here)

It is reported that Ukraine got a lot of intelligence about Russian troop movements by hacking cctv cameras along Russian roads.

Ukraine is also probing the Russian border in other places, but so far there are no reports of any other real breakthroughs, so this may be just to keep the Russians off-balance.

Russia has ordered the evacuation of more than 100,000 people from border zones. We saw video of the governor of Belgorod going door to door, persuading babushkas to leave.

Ukrainian forces have taken Russian prisoners, with numbers flying around that range from 300 to 2,000. Some of the prisoners are 19-year-old conscripts; Russia has tried to keep young conscripts out of the fighting, and when they had to throw them into the breach to stem Ukraine's major attack of September, 2022 there was a lot of grumbling in Russia. It seems that they were "defending" this segment of the front line because Russia did not think anything would happen there.

Russia is using aircraft to attack the Ukrainian forces, but the pilots are being very cautious, apparently because Ukraine brought up a lot of anti-aircrat units; we've seen video of Russian helicopters flying 10 feet off the ground, which you only do when you are very nervous about being shot down. Plus Ukraine now has F-16s with long-range air-to-air missiles, and presumably some of them are hovering around, looking for opportunities to dash in and launch a missile at any Russian plane that lingers too long over this area. It has been confirmed by Russian sources that two jet fighters and one attack helicopter have been lost in the past few days, likely here.

Nobody knows what Ukraine's military goals are, so we don't know how likely they are to achieve them. But politically this is, so far, a big win for Ukraine. Ukraine's friends are pumped up, and Russia's are some combination of angry and despondent. I haven't sensed so much energy in the pro-Ukraine community since their last major offensive petered out in the summer of 2023.

Some random tweets:

Zelenskyy "pressured Ukrainian generals to carry out the operation to counter the narrative that Ukraine has lost the war, accepting the risk of escalating conflict and potential severe repercussions."

Ukrainian reserve officer Tatarigami: "One of the arguments used by Russian propaganda during the occupation of Crimea was that the local population didn’t resist the invasion. Following that same logic, it seems that Kursk has been waiting for years to join Ukraine."

Supposed video from a Russian man in Sudzha who says he asked a Ukrainian soldier what he should do. The reply was, "Learn the Ukrainian anthem and prepare for a referendum."

Russians keep claiming to have spotted western special forces in Kursk, especially Brits and Poles, leading to lots of jokes like this and this.

Military Analyst Jan Kallberg: "The Russians' massive officer losses in Bachmut and along the front are now playing out in Kursk. With no experienced junior officers that can lead, the Russian units become just a mass of individuals, and they will take massive losses."

11 AM Eastern time Monday:

Yesterday the Russian MoD claimed that Ukrainian armor had reached the settlements of Tolpino, Zhuravli and Obshchii Kolodez, but were repelled. We often see the Russians exaggerate the success of the Ukrainians only to claim that they have been repelled back to the positions that they actually occupy. However in the case of Zhuravli, Ukrainian MRAPs have been geolocated to the eastern edge of the settlement. The question now becomes, did the Russians actually repel the attacks? . . .  If Ukrainian forces have in fact successfully advanced to Tolpino as well, then Korenevo is in danger of being enveloped. This is a key position that would allow Ukraine to continue the attack on towards the strategically important town of Rylsk.

Tweet dated August 11 from Marcus Faber, chairman of the defense committee in the German parliament:

Dear Friends,

The Ukrainian attack on the invasion force near Kursk is going better than expected. It forces the aggressor to withdraw large forces from the front in the east, easing the situation there. A reason to talk more about [sending] Leopard2.

The attack shows the Russian population that their dictator has lost control and that the military leadership is overwhelmed. A good basis for peace negotiations with Putin's successor. And negotiating with Putin at the International Criminal Court.

Thread on the organization Russia has set up to deal with the Kursk crisis, and the potential problems. It's a "counter-terrorist operation," which means the FSB and other security services have a role as well as the military. The military forces involved are drawn from multiple military districts. So who is in charge? We don't know.

13 August

The heaviest fighting is on the eastern and western edges of the offensive, around Korenevo and Martynovka; also fighting around Giri, at the end of the easternmost pseudopod. Some Russian units are fighting hard and some Ukrainian thrusts have been halted. But, again, since we don't know where Ukraine is trying to go, we have no idea how hard they are trying to take the positions that the Russians are defending.

This source says arriving Russian forces are massing as Martynovka, where there may be 10,000 troops blocking the road to Kursk city.

More Ukrainian videos are starting to come out: Ukrainian special forces attack a small Russian position, Ukrainian airstrike.

I doubt this guy's maps are really accurate, but note that the units marked on these maps are all companies, meaning only 150 or so men even if they were at full strength, which most are not.

Elon Musk Loses the Thread

Tweet from Elon today:

Question: how much this kind of political fantasy matter? Do the people who think they are rebels from Star Wars have enough power to screw up the world?

Shashank Joshi's response was, "Who can forget the moment in Star Wars where the Rebel Alliance surrounds a Holiday Inn in Rotherham and tries to murder all the migrants inside. A heartwarming moment."

Modern Warfare II: Retro

Those of you who know anything about World War I may recall that the first air to air combat was fought with rifles and pistols; before machine guns were mounted on planes, pilots or navigators would sometimes just take shots at enemy planes. Now via YouTuber Perun, we have the tale of how this has returned in the 21st century. One of the biggest problems with fighting drones is that often the weapons you might use to shoot them down cost more than the drones you are shooting at. But Ukraine has found a low-cost solution! Russian bloggers claim that a certain Yakovlev 52 two-seat, propeller-driven training plane has been roving the front around Kherson, attacking Russian reconaissance drones, often with a shotgun wielded by the gunner. They claim this plane is responsible for more than a dozen drone kills.

Modern Warfare: Ukraine's Surprise Attack on Kursk

How did Ukraine launch a successful surprise attack in this age of constant drone surveillance? David Hambling at Forbes:

First, they brought down Russia’s screen of aircraft-type reconnaissance drones, effectively blinding commanders to what was happening. This may have been done by new interceptor FPVs linked to air-defence radar.

There have been several videos lately showing Ukrainian quadcopter drones attacking larger Russian fixed-wing drones, and now we see what that was all about: blinding the Russians along certain segments of the front. 

Secondly, under cover of the temporary observation blackout, short-range jammers were brought forward to the front line. These were programmed with data previously gleaned from electronic warfare reconnaissance.

“They discovered the main frequencies of our border radio communication networks, drone control frequencies, and prepared powerful jammers that crushed our communications,” according to another Russian blogger quoted by WarTranslated.

This was at least partly possible because the area was considered low priority and was not supplied with the latest equipment. In Ukraine, the war of drones versus jammers has been a constant arms race of upgrades as each move to evade jammed frequencies is countered by new jammers. It seems the drones in this sector were not working to the latest standards.

The result was that Russian drones, essential to identify targets and guide artillery, as well as FPVs, were not able to function. According to WarTranslated’s source, even the feared Lancet loitering munitions were partly affected. 

Drones are a major asset for stopping armored assaults. Recent reports suggest that they account for two-thirds or more of the tanks killed, with videos showing entire armored assaults knocked out one-by-one by successive FPV hits long before they reached enemy positions.

By concentrating enough jamming resources in the Kursk sector, Ukraine neutralized Russia’s drones, allowing their armor to cross open territory without being destroyed.

But how did they tackle Russian troops dug deep into defensive lines built over the course of two years?

According to [Russian blogger] Three, Ukraine filled the skies with its own drones, “an incessant barrage of high-precision FPVs, which go in swarms.”

OSINT analyst Roy notes that in recent weeks Ukraine has employed powerful drone bombs to blast openings in the overhead cover of Russian trenches and dugouts. Skilled FPV pilots are able to fly though these openings and clear the trench below.

It may be significant that some videos of the action showed new Ukrainian dive-bomber drones. While quadcopter dive-bombing has been seen before, these look like aircraft-type drones with longer range and greater payload. It is a distinct echo of the original Blitzkrieg concept of dive-bombers in close support of ground troops.

One the trenches are cleared, new Ukrainian ranger units quickly moved in to occupy and secure the empty positions, following close behind the drones (‘Drone rangers’?). Then the radio jammers were brought forward, and the whole process was repeated for the next stage of the advance.

Links 9 August 2024

Thomas Hoepker, New York 1983

The strange career of Robert Irwin, who battled with Edward Said about orientalism: "It was in my first year at Oxford that I decided to become a Muslim saint."

A claim that new fragments of Euripides have been discovered.

Ted Gioia on our ambivalence about love songs.

Via Tyler Cowen, a wedding in which the couple fight with light sabers instead of having a spotlight dance. (Twitter/X)

In Japan, like everywhere else, poor children and children of less educated parents do worse in school. Here's a news story on some Japanese efforts to close the gap.

Musket balls found near Concord's North Bridge may have been fired during the first battle of the Revolutionary War (NY Times, Park Service press release). That would be these shots:

By the rude bridge that standed the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the battled farmers stood,
And fired shot heard round the world.

Neil Gorsuch: "America criminalizes too much and punishes too much."

Last week Scott Siskind tried to take on the neo-Nietzscheans who think altruism is a mistake because it makes the world weaker. In the comments he got a bit of an education from Nietzsche scholars on what a vexed and complicated question this is. My view is that Nietzsche was a great critic but useless as a guide to how one should think or live; to the extent that he says anything positive about the future it is a series of poetic prophecies best considered as metaphors. Honestly the whole debate makes the weakness of the Rationalist movement very clear.

Skeptoid: no, medical error is not the third leading cause of death in the US.

Roman fort discovered in Wales. The clues were a straight section of old road and a strikingly rectangular field. Straight lines and neat rectangles, the signature of the Empire.

More on the amazing US presidential race: "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Admits He Left a Dead Bear in Central Park." Allegedly, he tried to make it look like the bear cub had been killed by a bike. (NY Times)

In the early 1900s, thousands of Koreans moved to eastern Siberia to help the Russian empire develop the region; many more came after Japan conquered Korea in 1910. In 1937 Stalin, worried about such a concentration of foreigners, uprooted these colonies and scattered the people across central Asia. Now one fading city in South Korea has launched a program to bring hundreds of these people to Korea. (NY Times, wikipedia)

Ship likely sailed by the Barbary corsairs found on the Mediterranean sea floor.

More bones attributed to Homo floriensis, the mysterious hobbit people of Indonesia, are reported. With every bone the likelihood grows that this was a real species of miniature hominids, rather than deformed people or some kind of misidentification. (NY Times, CNN, original article)

Why didn't Rome have an industrial revolution? I think this and all similar explanations are too narrow; I see the industrial revolution as part of a whole civilization's shift away from conserving the old and toward making everything new, which I think is related to the discovery of new continents and the flood of new knowledge coming into Europe.

Kevin Drum reviews a new study focusing on which actions by state governments helped save lives during the pandemic.

The 150-year-old banyan tree in Lahaina, damaged by last summer's terrible fire, seems to be recovering nicely.

Discussing "Billie Jean" with my sons – a pop dance hit about a paternity suit – we fell to talking about other songs where the tune is a bizarre fit for the lyrics. I offered "Step it out Mary," a rowdy Irish number about a young woman who drowns herself for love. Other suggestions?

A claim that carvings on one stela at Göbekli Tepe are a 365-day calendar, the oldest yet discovered (news story, article).

Anonymous email to Tyler Cowen about life in Minsk, Belarus, says Chinese goods have replaced everything blocked by western sanctions and life is going on fine.

The joy of holding Olympic equestrian events at Versailles. It was jealousy that the French president could hold events at Versailles that led JFK to build the White House rose garden. Which is nice, but doesn't really compare to one of the world's greatest stages.

Ukraine's recent surprise attack into Russia, near Kursk, which has so far been quite successful: Thread on Twitter/X, Post on Substack, interesting Russian statement about new Ukrainian tactics. Institute for the Study of War, updates on 7 August, 8 August.

After more than a year of talk, American-made F-16 fighter jets are in Ukraine. (Twitter/X, ISW, BBC) Ukraine is speaking of them mainly as air defense weapons, and the ones seen flying over Odesa carried only jammers and air-to-air missiles. People on Twitter/X have been fantasizing about a major air raid on Crimea but so far that does not seem to be the plan.

Aftermath of a Ukrainian drone attack on an airbase at Morosovsk in Russia last week. One Su-34 jet destroyed, another probably damaged, and a large ammunition storage area obliterated in one of the biggest explosions of the war.

Back in December, Zelenskyy set Ukrainian manufacturers a goal of producing 1 million drones for the military this year. They have already met that goal. Zelenskyy says that 96% of the drones Ukraine uses are domestically produced. Ukrainian manufacturers are already looking forward to exporting drones worldwide.

Among the weapons North Korea has supplied to Russia are KN-23 tactial ballistic missiles. They are formidable on paper but Ukraine says about half of them have failed and crashed. Inspecting the wreckage, Ukrainian soldiers discovered that the steering bearings are taken from Toyota cars, not exactly built for the stresses of rocketry.

Killing Owls to Save Owls

The northern spotted owl shot to fame as a powerful weapon in the long-running fight over old growth forests in the northwest; millions of acres of forest were eventually set aside to insure its survival. But now the owls are declining again, and not because of anything people are doing:

Barred owls, which are considered native to the eastern United States, are increasingly appearing in the Pacific Northwest’s old-growth forests where the threatened northern spotted owls breed and live. Where the two birds overlap, the barred owls tend to outcompete the northern spotted owls, taking the best nest sites and harassing, killing or occasionally mating with spotted owls.

To protect spotted owls from this new menace, the US government has just authorized states and individuals to kill all the barred owls they can find, potentially hundreds of thousands. I agree with these three philosophers (NY Times) that this is a terrible idea. It is not likely to succeed, but ever if it were, it would still be a terrible idea.

Many philosophers, conservation biologists and ecologists are skeptical of the idea that we should restore current environments to so-called historical base lines, as this plan tries to do. In North America, the preferred base line for conservation is usually just before the arrival of Europeans. (In Western forests, this is often pegged to 1850, when significant logging began.) But life has existed on Earth for 3.7 billion years. Any point we choose as the “correct” base line will either be arbitrary or in need of a strong defense.

Restoring or preserving those historical base lines is only going to get more difficult. In some cases, it will be impossible — and this might be one of them. It is unclear that killing barred owls will do anything but merely slow the northern spotted owl’s eventual extinction. When barred owls were previously removed in a before-and-after experiment in areas of Oregon and Washington, the number of northern spotted owls still declined. The removal slowed that decline, but even with the planned killings, the barred owl is here in the West to stay.

We should strive to care for ecosystems given their current ecological realities. Ecosystems are dynamic and have always changed over time as organisms move around. And now, humans are inescapable drivers of ecological changes. Climate change and wildfire have accelerated the dynamism of ecosystems. Killing barred owls will not restore the forests to the way they were in 1850.

Glenn Loury on University Education

Interesting interview with Glenn Loury, economist best known for being a black conservative and for his spectacular mid-career crack-up involving drugs and affairs, from which he seems to have recovered. I appreciated this:

There's too much focus on race and sex and sexuality as identities in the context of the university environment, where our main goal is to acquaint our students with the cultural inheritance of civilization. Their narrow focus on being this particular thing and chopping up the curriculum to make sure that it gets representative treatment feels stifling to me, especially if you let that spill over into what can be said.

The therapeutic sentiment. The kids have these sensibilities. We have to be mindful of them. We don't want to offend. We don't want anyone to be uncomfortable. No, the whole point is to make you uncomfortable. You came thinking something that was really a very superficial and undeveloped framework for thinking; I'm going to expose you to some ideas that run against that grain, and you're going to have to learn how to grapple with them. And in your maturity, you may well return to some of these, but you will do so with a much firmer sense of exactly what it is that you're affirming. I want to educate you. I don't want to placate you. I'm not here to make you feel better.

Art Nouveau Helsinki

For reasons that are unclear to me, Helsinki, Finland has a remarkable array of Art Nouveau buildings, mainly contructed between 1898 and 1914. Tyler Cowen called it the best Art Nouveau city, with only Brussels as a possible rival.

The city became the capital of Finland after Russia took it from Sweden in 1812, and the Russians embarked on a major rebuilding program that was basically complete by 1862. So it wasn't politics. I suppose Helsinki was just part of the generaly economic good times of 1896 to 1910, and these buildings were the result.

Kaarlenkatu 11, 1915, from the time when even telephone exchanges could be nice buildings.

More.

Love some of these details.

Two Poems by Du Fu (c. 712-770)

Spring View
Translated by Arthur Sze

The nation is broken, but hills and rivers remain.
Spring is in the city, grasses and trees are thick.
Touched by the hard times, flowers shed tears.
Grieved by separations, birds are startled in their hearts.

The beacon fires burned for three straight months.
A letter from home would be worth ten thousand pieces of gold.
As I scratch my white head, the hairs become fewer:
so scarce that I try in vain to fasten them with a pin. 

Thwarted
Translated by Carolyn Kizer

Thwarted, old friend! We have been baulked again.
Though we live at opposite ends of the same lane
We haven’t seen each other for ten whole days.

I returned my Official Horse to the local authorities
And the road is rotten, like a deliberate plot.
An obstacle course! Now, thanks to my lack of credit

I can’t even rent a carriage, though I still have shoes.
But what if my department head caught me afoot?
Taking such risks with protocol, face, future!
You know I’d walk through brambles to get to you.

By morning the rain is furious. I’m resigned.
Though I’ve raved like the spring wind, in my sleep.
Now I’m deaf to the ring-bell and the bang-drum,
The summons to Court. Next door a lame donkey grazes.

A complaisant neighbor owns him, lends him. Ho!
But I daren’t ride the beast in the slick mud.
Not to that slippery Palace! Let them mark me absent.
Life is one long, fragmented, murky episode.

Looking Back at the Streaming Revolution

At the NY Times, musician Elizabeth Nelson reviews a documentary, co-produced by Eminem, that hails the original online music pirates as the heroes of a wonderful revolution. Nelson is unconvinced, and offers these two possible takes:

The story they want to tell, in an emphatically triumphalist tone, is that the early pirates were David and the music industry was Goliath. But then the industry realized that David was actually pretty cool: All turned out well, and music was solved forever.

I may be speaking as a working musician here, but from my perspective — the perspective, I think, of almost any nonmogul with a stake in the industry — this is an obviously insane interpretation of events. The problem isn’t just the ever-decreasing viability of even established, popular artists keeping food on the table. There is also a cultural poverty that attends the streaming economy. There is the ruthless profit maximization and the constant steering of listeners toward the same music. There is the lock-step social engineering and manufactured consensus. There is the escalating — and demeaning — sense of music being treated as a utility that need not be meaningfully engaged with. There are the Spotify playlists peppered with songs generated by fake artists that Spotify owns the rights to, allowing the company to recapture its own royalty payments. And at the same time, there is the fact that nearly every space where consumers could once interact with music unsupervised by corporate gatekeepers — record stores, mail order, merch tables — has been put on life support.

I have long considered online music piracy to be the just comeuppance of an industry that refused either to sell the public what they wanted or price what they were selling anywhere near what people wanted to pay. Back in 1990, if you heard a song on the radio by an artist who intrigued you, the only thing you could do was to go out and pay $18 for a cd that, as often as not, had only one good song, the one you had already heard. I did this at least ten times, and I resented it. I remember reading critics at the time who said that people were begging for singles, not albums, but the industry mostly refused to sell them and when they did they charged $5-7. I understood that downloading was theft, but, again, I had zero sympathy for anyone in the music industry.

I think the amount of money non-famous artists used to make from album sales is often exaggerated these days. Other than the biggest stars, only cranky hermits could really earn a living just off sales. Touring was always how musicians made it, and it still is. Live music is bigger than ever before. Many musicians regard their appearances on Spotify more as free ads for their live shows than as a meaningful revenue stream.

As for corporate sameness, well, that is pretty much the top lament of our cultural era. My experience, however, has been completely different. Thanks to YouTube I have discovered more new music over the past five years than any comparable period of my life. Viz., all the Nordic Ambient music I have discovered, artists like Waldruna and Sigur Ros. How would I have discovered this music in 1990? How would I have stumbled onto Eivor, singing in Faroese? I can't imagine. As I recall, the way it worked was that you had to have a friend who was a music obsessive who spent 20 percent of his income on obscure albums he ordered from catalogs. Absent such a friend who happened to be plugged in, you were out of luck. (Whatever Elizabeth Nelson thinks, a record store was absolutely not a space where you could interact with music without corporate gatekeepers.)

It is true that the algorithms of YouTube and Spotify are mostly useless, to a degree that baffles me; given all the money there to be made by a service that really made good recommendations, why can't anyone make it work? But only a small amount of reading and exploration is enough to find some names of artists and bands who sound interesting, and rather than having to plunk down $18 to find out what they sound like you can just pop online and listen.

From my perspective, this is the greatest era ever to be a lover of music.

Timgad

Timgad in Algeria was founded by the emperor Trajan in 100 AD as a colony of Roman veterans. It is most famous in our time from aerial images like this one, which show its marvelously preserved street grid. The Latin name was Marciana Traiana Thamugadi, that is the town of Trajan and Marciana (his sister) at Thamagudi, the Berber name of the place. It was placed to help defend the Roman coastal zone against attacks from Berbers in the interior.

From Google Earth, showing the whole of the original town. The projection to the lower left is the Capitol, the Temple of Jupiter.

Street views.

Ground level views of the ruins.

The arch of Trajan.

In the third century AD Timgad became a center of Christianity, and in the fourth century it was one of the centers of the Donatist sect. This is an overhead view of the Donatist cathedral.

The well in the cathedral courtyard.

A neighborhood aqueduct.

There is a large cemetery, from which these monuments came. European scholars began visiting the site in the 1760s, and there were extensive excavations in from the 1880s down to WW II.

Bits of sculpture photographed in the 1920s.

Objects in the adjacent museum, including a stela with a representation of a funeral meal.

Truly an amazing place.

Links 2 August 2024

Belt Buckle from the Tomb of a Turkish Khan, c. 500 AD

Sen. Roger Wicker on the recent US/Russia prisoner exchange: "This exchange speaks volumes about what our two countries value. Vladimir Putin is getting back a crew of thugs, murderers, and low-life criminals. The United States is welcoming home journalists, voices for democracy, and former service members."

New chariot burial unearthed in Italy, dates to c. 700 BC.

"Old Growth," great series of tree photographs by Mitch Epstein.

Amusing alternate birthstone lists from 1925.

A claim that 2009-2024 has been the best 15 years in US economic history, (Twitter/X). This guy's whole feed is an attack on bizarre notions about how bad the US economy is.

Recap of a 2023 conference on Europe in the third millennium BC, focusing on the Bell Beaker phenomenon, lots of fascinating data on how different things were in different parts of Europe. (37-minute video) Brings out that various European archaeologists see this phenomenon very differently. Also, this is one area in which the new genetic data complicates the story rather than explaining it.

Kevin Drum takes a look at why the US has fewer doctors than other rich nations despite spending more on health care.

Interesting eco-modernist "destination coffee shop" in Thailand.

Scott Siskind argues that liberalism is a compromise between Nietzsche's "master morality" and "slave morality": "A final secret of this compromise is that master morality and slave morality aren’t perfect opposites. Master morality wants to embiggen itself. Slave morality wants to feel secure that everyone agrees embiggening is bad. The compromise is that we all agree embiggening is bad, but leave people free to do it anyway. So half of Western intellectual output is criticisms of capitalism and neoliberalism, yet capitalism and neoliberalism remain hegemonic. Everybody agrees to hate billionaires; also, billionaires are richer than ever."

The curious diet of the speckled mousebird.

There is now an antiviral drug that prevents HIV infection with a semiannual injection. 

A scholarly paper has been published arguing that before modern water treatment, it really was safer to drink beer than water.

Lynchings and other violence against Italian Americans in Louisiana around 1900: "Italian Americans became targets for mob violence precisely because of their connections with, and similarity in social position to, Black Louisianians."

Thorough but not too technical summary of the CrowdStrike debacle. Also a good primer on the metaphors used by computer security experts.

The origins of the personal diary in the 16th century.

Fascinating compendium of data on how people spend their time, and how much they enjoy it. Interesting that "playing with a child" scores near the top for pleasure; playing computer games come out significantly more pleasurable than watching television.

Some new data and new thinking about the migration of Homo sapiens sapiens from Africa and our interbreeding with Neanderthals.

Some primers on Assembly Theory, which purports to be a physics for the origins of life, and a way to distinguish life from non-life: short news article, big technical paper, NY Times, wikipedia, video from the Bergruen Institute. This Substack post is long but the best explanation I have found, lays out how the argument has evolved over the past seven years.

Why a potentially dangerous bird flu is spreading in cows.

Massive protests underway in Nigeria against price increases and general government mismanagement.

Review of US defense policy ordered by Biden finds that current spending is inadequate to confront the threats poised by China, Russia, and other potential enemies: "The U.S. public are largely unaware of the dangers the United States faces or the costs (financial and otherwise) required to adequately prepare." Also says that in terms of national security, "the trends are getting worse, not better." (news article, Rand Corp summary, report)

The next time you meet somebody who says there has been "no accounting" of US aid to Ukraine, refer them to this 183-page GAO report.

US arms sales are soaring, what with everyone around the world buying weapons and Russian weapon systems failing in Ukraine: "The US Air Force is forecasting $46 billion in Foreign Military Sales this year, up 60% from last year's $28.7 billion." (Twitter/X, Defense News)

ISW update on a failed Russian armored assault near Kostyantynivka (south of Donetsk city), July 24, may have been the largest such assault since last October: "The Russian military command's continued willingness to suffer high armored vehicle losses for minor tactical gains instead of conserving armored vehicles for operations that pursue operationally significant objectives will impose increasingly significant costs on Russian forces."

Colby Badhwar on Ukrainian air defense: what they have, what they need, and why the best thing would be to attack Russian bases before the missiles are even fired.

Victor Sebesteyn, "1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire"

British-Hungarian journalist Victor Sebesteyn covered the revolutions of 1989, and twenty years later he published this book. Even if you followed those events closely as they happened it is still worth revisiting them now, since much information that was then kept secret has now come out – some because of official commissions of inquiry launched by post-communist governments – and many of the participants have written memoirs explaining their own parts. 1989 is a good book, easy to read, covering a lot of ground in 400 pages. I'm mainly going to focus here on how Sebesteyn's account differs from others, such as Tony Judt's in Postwar.

To Sebesteyn, the fall of communism was all about money. In his account, Gorbachev and his cronies decided to abandon the Warsaw Pact states to their fates because they thought the Soviet Union couldn't afford to support them any longer. The Soviet economy had been buoyed in 1973-1985 by high prices for oil and natural gas, but once those prices fell they were staring at national bankruptcy. They pursued arms control and ratcheting down the Cold War because they desperately wanted to reduce defense spending. The memos have now been published showing that Gorbachev ordered Soviet troops to stay in their barracks throughout the turmoil of 1989, because he did not want to risk any incident that would jeapordize relations with the West. As a secret Foreign Ministry memo put it, "the satellite states were not worth keeping." (232)

Meanwhile the eastern European states were in even worse financial shape. Most of them had fallen deeply into debt to western nations. East Germany for a while paid its interest on those loans by selling dissidents to the west. The West Germans realized the power this gave them and began to use it; they helped to force the hardline Hungarian party boss Kadar from power by offering the men plotting his overthrow a one billion Deutschmark line of credit should they succeed.

So Sebesteyn's basic theory of the revolution is that bankrupt nations entered negotiations with opponents hoping for some way out of their morass, or at least to shift the blame onto someone else, but that really just showed their weakness, leading to their quick overthrow.

But of course the starring role in these events goes here to Gorbachev, as in all the accounts I have read. The key event of 1989 was the one that did not happen, a Soviet invasion. 

Sebesteyn's Gorbachev comes across as basically bored by the Warsaw Pact. He did not care about Romania or Bulgaria, did not want to waste his time on their problems, and did not want to spend a single ruble shoring up their regimes. He wanted to be a globe-bestriding, history-making figure, and he much prefered going to Berlin or London where people cheered him to grim meetings with party bosses in Warsaw or Bucharest. And he genuinely believed, in 1989, that his style of reform communism was a viable route to a better future.

Events in Russia since 1991, I think, should disabuse us of any notion that freedom for the Warsaw Pact states was inevitable. In some places, notably Romania, the economic situation has hardly improved since 1989, and many people across the region tell pollsters that things were better under communism. So from my vantage point I see 1989 as the intersection of long-term trends – economic decline and the fading of Stalinist ideology – with a short-term financial crisis and the ascension of a clique of Soviet leaders who chose not to intervene when people in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia rose up against their leaders and East Germans voted with their feet in favor of the west.

The American Revolution as Part of the Enlightenment Crisis

British historian Richard Whatmore has a new book, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis, and Ritchie Robertson reviewed it in the February 2 TLS. Reading this review reminded me of things about the American Revolution that I wish more Americans understood, especially the ones who seem to think it was just a power grab by devious slave owners.

While many Europeans were feeling both politically and culturally bullish in the mid 1700s, others were worried. People like David Hume feared what would happen when the soaring Enlightenment rhetoric about freedom and equality collided with aristocratic political systems and the realities of government. (Those who lived long enough saw these fears confirmed in the course of the French Revolution.) They were also worried about economic changes. The economies of Britain and France were growing because of global trade, and global trade was enmeshed in the colonial mercantile system and the brutialities of the slave plantations. This was, they thought, horribly corrupting, not to mention the exact opposite of Enlightenment calls for peace and human rights. The acts of the British East Indian company were denounced in the British Parliament, and outside the establishment more radical thinkers were even more hostile. Numerous books were written, and speeches given, calling for Britain and France to withdraw from "war and empire", embrace peace and free trade, give up trying to dominate foreign people, and focus on gradually improving conditions at home. Robertson:

One achievement of Whatmore's book is to document the actue sense of crisis that, as he says, inspired political observers with a variety of dire forebodings. Britain's wealth depended on colonies; these were enlarged and defended by wars, which demanded ever more taxation and indebtedness. Hume imagined several ways in which this cycle might be broken. One was national bankruptcy; another was that the landed interest might accept defeat by France rather than increase the national debit or that colonial revolts, combined with an economic crisis, might inspire riots at home, which would be quelled by official violence. In a letter of 1768, quoted by Whatmore, he indulged in a semi-serious flight of fancy:

Oh how I long to see America and the East Indies revolted totally & finally, the Revenue reduc'd to half, public Credit fully discredited by Bankruptcy, the third of London in ruins, and the rascally Mob subdu'd. I think I am not too old to despair of being Witness to all of these things.

Here Hume seems incongruously to join hands with Thomas Paine, who foretold the imminent collapse of funding by credit in 1796. . . . Others denounced reliance on colonies not only because it was exploitative, but because oppression overseas must rebound on the mother country. 

This is Catherian Macaulay, a radical historian who crossed swords with Hume:

The conquests of foreign nations are dangerous triumphs. . . . it never fails of subjecting the conquerors to the same measure of slavery which they have imposed on the conquered.

The American Revolution took place amidst this turmoil. American intellectuals like Jefferson and John Adams wanted to withdraw America from what they saw as a corrupt system of global exploitation. They very much feared that some British corporation would do to them what the East India Company had done in Bengal. They saw the mercantile system the way many people now see the military industrial complex, as a machine that ginned up wars for its own interest and cared not how many died or were oppressed so long as profits could be made.

Which is not to say that the American revolutionaries were pure and noble, only that they were responding to fears about global economic changes that parallel those of many contemporary leftists who think the revolution was a mistake.

The Strange Case of Martin Šmíd

On November 17, 1989, there was a student demonstration in Prague. This was the height of the turmoil in the Warsaw Pact: the Berlin Wall had fallen two weeks before, and the Czechoslovak government would fall just two weeks later. About 3,000 students marched to Prague's National Cemetery to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of a Czech hero killed by the Nazis. While they were milling around at the cemetery gate, somebody started shouting, "To Wenceslas Square," the hearth of the city. So the marchers changed directons. Just before they reached the square, their path was blocked by riot police. Eventually some of the police attacked and beat the protesters, and around 120 were arrested. 

This is where the Czechoslovak Revolution enters the murky, looking-glass world of Kafka and Švejk, spiced with a hint of John le Carré. Rumour travelled fast in Communist capitals and it was generally believed, certainly more so than the official media. Within hours, the word was that the prone body seen lying on Narodni Street was that of a mathematics student, Martin Šmíd. It was spread mainly by the dissident Charter 77 activist Peter Uhl, who daily provided information from the opposition underground to journalists from the West. Uhl had been told about the death by a woman calling herself Drahomira Dražská, who claimed to be an old friend of Šmíd. Uhl immediately told Radio Free Europe, the BBC and Voice of America, which reported the death of Martin Šmíd as fact. There was a public fury throughout Czechoslovakia. The regimed denied that anybody had died in the 'riot' and the next day managed to produce two Martin Šmíds, both of them alive. One, who had been at the demonstration, appeared on nationwide TV breathing and talking. It did little good. Nobody believed the regime's denials.

That weekend huge spontaneous demonstratione erupted in Prague on an unprecedented scale. An archway on Narodni Street where many of the police beatings had taken place was turned into a shrine visited by scores of thousands of people. Someone had painted a cross on a wall nearby and passers-by lit candles. "The news about that death changed everything, not just for us, but for our parents' generation," said Dasha Antelova. "They had been silent since 1968, terrified of what they could lose. But not they were as enraged as we young people were."

But it was all a fake. Nobody had been killed on November 17. After the government had been overthrown in the "Velvet Revolution," people started looking into what had really happened. A new rumor spread, that the whole thing had been cooked up by a faction of the Communist Party who wanted to overthrow the old hardline leaders and replace them when Gorbachev-style reformers. That would not have been surprising, since coups of exactly that type had recently taken place in East Germany and Bulgaria. One of the people who believed and spread that rumor was a Hungarian journalist named Victor Sebesteyn, whose book 1989 I am reading and from which this comes. Sebesteyn's account continues:

The plan was the brainchild of General Alois Lorenc, head of the StB [Czech KBG], and a small group of Party reformers who looked at events in Poland and Hungary and thought the only way of maintaining their own positions was to find a means of negotiating from strength with a divided opposition. At the same time, the other essential step in the operation – codenamed Wedge – was to infiltrate the dissident movement and find opposition figures willing to do a deal with reform Communists. . . . A key player was Lieutenant Ludvik Zífčak, a young StB officer who, under orders, had infiltrated the student opposition underground. In a classic 'provocation', he was one of the leaders of the main march to the National Cemetery and one of the students shouting at the top of his voice "To Wenceslas Square." He knew there would be a trap when the students arrived. He kept his head down as far as possible when the violence began. He lay on the ground and pretended to be dead. Drahomira Dražská, who subsequently disappeared, was another agent. She had orders to pass on the news to Uhl that a student had died.

The new Czech parliament eventually convened a committee to look into the matter, and they were unable to confirm the story. But the version they put out, that Drahomira Dražská had cooked up the whole thing by herself, has never persuaded most Czechs.

One of the things I find fascinating about 1989 is the way, in that crazy time, small sparks could set off big explosions. For example, the poor wording of the East German spokesperson whose announcement of a proposed plan to loosen travel restrictions convinced thousands of hearers that the border was open, leading to the breaching of the Berlin Wall just 12 hours later. In Sebesteyn's version, an attempted coup by a communist faction instead launched the protests that overthrew the whole regime. But what if it really was just a mad story dreamed up by an obscure woman who wanted to feel like she was playing some part in history? What if Drahomira Dražská's lie launched the revolution?

David Reich on Indo-European Genetics

Some updates on what the science is telling us, from this lecture, on YouTube. First, Yamnaya – the Ukrainian people who spread Indo-European languages across Eurasia – took form around 4000 BC. They mainly migrated from the east, from the Don River basin and the northern Caucasus, but interbred with local hunter-gatherers. They were not numerous, only a few thousand people. They lived around the lower reaches of the Dnipro River.

Then around 3600-3400 BC they exploded in numbers, a "classic founder event." (Founder events are when a few people reach a new environment where they multiply enormously, like the New England Puritans or the first French Canadians.) Around 3500 BC is when we first get good evidence for wheels, and Yamnaya skeletons show evidence that they rode horses. So it looks like the Yamnaya had by 3500 BC perfected both horse riding and cart-building and launched themselves onto the steppes as nomadic herders. They were very successful and soon there were hundreds of thousands of them.

Then around 3200 BC they launched themselves into the world so rapidly that their expansion "broke the connection between geography and genetics." All the samples shown on the map above are just Yamnaya, genetically from the same population.

One of the big remaining questions in all of this is where the first Indo-European languages arose. Reich points to the North Caucasus as the likely homeland. 

The Republican Party as Trump's Personal Machine

Peter Wehner in the NY Times:

Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and my sometime co-author, told me that to begin to understand what has happened, you have to understand the difference between a personal political machine and a traditional political machine. Unlike normally functioning parties and their political machines, like Tammany Hall, Mr. Rauch said, a personal political machine is dedicated to the interests of an individual and that individual’s family, loyalists and operatives. It accepts only one person as leader and requires submission to that person. Today, Mr. Trump is that person.

Personal machines are different from party machines, Mr. Rauch added, because they’re inconsistent with democratic politics. Even a corrupt party machine maintains institutional interests separate from those of its leader. It rewards and punishes behavior based on the electoral interests of the party, prioritizing winning elections over personal loyalty to the boss. A party machine thus rewards followers by getting them elected and then sustaining them in office. By contrast, a personal machine is willing to lose elections rather than share power with other leaders or factions. It puts the leader ahead of the party, and it would rather the party lose elections than the leader lose control.

“Because a personal machine puts loyalty ahead of electability, it must resort to authoritarian and anti-democratic measures like coercion and intimidation to preserve its hold on the party,” Mr. Rauch said. “It may physically threaten those who do not play ball. And it will use propaganda and the party organization to build up the leader as the one and only true expression of the party. That’s why Trump’s Republican Party is a cult of personality.”

The Birth Pangs of the AI Revolution

As companies move to use AI for routine tasks, they are finding that this sometimes creates more work for their human employees. I already mentioned here that companies are hiring more translators; some people are claiming that this is because editing AI-generated text is more time consuming that just making the translation yourself. Forbes is running a story with this headline:

77% Of Employees Report AI Has Increased Workloads And Hampered Productivity, Study Finds

Part of the problem is that firms are just telling their employees "use AI to speed up your work," without telling them how. But how to use AI efficiently without loss of accuracy is actually a difficult problem that requires some high-level thought to sort out. Sometimes the whole workflow model needs to be changed.

And this:

In tech, especially programming, we're finding that a large swath are getting their code generated in like 5 minutes where it'd take them like 3 hours to write it but they're now spending much longer debugging said code because it's crap and they didn't write it.

I actually just had a conversation with one of sons about this next question, specifically whether laying out an progress tree for a game mod should be called "programming." I say it should be:

Programming is 95% understanding the problem + formulating a robust solution then 5% sitting down to write the actual code.

At the moment AI can only do that last 5%. That will probably change, but it might not change fast.

Let me tell you sometime about running a novel with lots of dialogue through a grammar checker. . . .