Faking It

Siddhartha Mukherjee, describing his boyhood in Delhi, tosses off this:

In the nineteen-sixties, my father, having clambered through the ranks of a Japanese multinational (it was a folie a deux; he spoke incomprehensible English and his managers didn't understand any), had built himself a sizable two-story house. . . .

This immediately put me in mind of other such stories I have heard, of people who faked their way through corporate or bureaucratic life for years, without any idea of how to do their jobs. Are these stories real?

In the old days there were lots of stories about male executives whose work was all done by their secretaries.

These days there are lots of stories about people who go to team meetings and spout lots of buzzwords and impress their bosses with their can-do attitude, but never actually produce anything. How real is that?

Meanwhile in Middle Earth

It's Over Gandalf – We Need to Unite Behind Saruman to Save Middle Earth from Sauron

"Remember, you might not like having to support Saruman but we live in a two tower system."

The Torlonia Collection

Thanks to the History Blog, I discovered the existence of an amazing private collection of classical antiquities:

One of the most important private collections of ancient sculpture in the world hasn’t been on display in four decades. In fact, it really hasn’t been on public display since the 19th century. The Torlonia family’s collection of antiquities, 620 world-class Greek, Roman and Etruscan statues and sarcophagi, has been favorably compared without hyperbole to the ancient sculpture collections of the Capitoline and Vatican Museums.

The image above seems to depict part of the collection in storage. Below are some of the more famous pieces.

The Torlonias are not an ancient family by Roman standards,and only came to Italy in the 18th century. They became textile merchants and then profited handsomely by dealing with the French during the Napoleonic years. Those years of turmoil ruined many old Roman families, who, as a result, had to sell off pieces of their family collections. The Torlonias snapped them up.

By 1859 they had enough material to open their own private museum in part of one of their palaces. But they did not admit the mere public, only their aristocratic friends and the occasional expert.

Even that limited access was closed off in the 1960s, and the pieces put into storage:

A 1979 judgement from Italy’s supreme court of appeals found that the sculptures had been stored in “narrow, insufficient, dangerous spaces [...] removed from the museum [...] crammed together in unbelievable fashion, leaned against each other without care for consistency or history.” The court ruled that the private owner should pay a fine to the state equal to the value lost or diminished by this dire, careless treatment of cultural patrimony. That ruling was never enforced.

Negotiations between the Torlonias and the government have taken place at intervals ever since, over how the best pieces might be displayed. I am not sure why the Torlonias have been so hostile about this whole business, but I suppose we can imagine plenty of reasons why a wealthy Italian family might distrust the state. This is in the news now because a tentative agreement has finally been reached:

The Italian government has tried for years to craft an agreement with the family that would allow these unique treasures to be seen by the public. On Tuesday, March 15th, Culture Minister Dario Franceschini announced that the long-sought agreement has been reached and about 60-90 of the most important pieces in the Torlonia collection will go on display in 2017. The details haven’t been worked out yet, but the likely venue will be the Palazzo Caffarelli Clementino on the Capitoline Hill.

Good news of a sort, although given the amount of Roman sculpture already on view in Rome, a travelling exhibit would be a much better idea, and it might even raise some money for the proper conservation of these priceless objects.

Are you Oppressed Enough?

The latest from the cutting edge of the culture war in Britain:

The National Union of Students’ LGBT Campaign has passed a motion calling for the abolition of representatives for gay men – because they “don’t face oppression” in the LGBT community.

The NUS LGBT+ Campaign discussed the issue at its annual conference, which took place in Sheffield this week.

At the event, delegates passed a motion that blames “cis gay men” for “misogyny, transphobia, racism and biphobia”.

It says: “Misogyny, transphobia, racism and biphobia are often present in LGBT+ societies. This is unfortunately more likely to occur when the society is dominated by white cis gay men.”

The motion continues to call on LGBT societies at universities – many of whom have dedicated reps for lesbians, trans people, bi people and gay men – to abolish the role for gay men.

It seems that the NUS – actually a rather small group of left-wing students – has committees on which certain categories of people are automatically represented, to insure that their voices are heard. This has recently included gay men, lesbians, trans people, and bisexual people. But now it seems that gay men are not oppressed enough to be guaranteed representation, so they may no longer get those automatic committee slots. In fact they seem to be engaged in oppressing others, so can it be long before they are banned from the organization altogether?

But then this is the same organization the refused to condemn the Islamic State, lest they stray into "Islamophobia."

More from Inside that Viking Pot

Images of more objects from inside the Carolingian pot stuffed with Viking Treasure, courtesy of The History Blog. I don't know who that guy is, but he (or she) always manages to get huge pictures of artifacts from British finds, images that don't show up in any other press account and are much bigger files than the ones that do.

A Walk to Oak Hill Cemetery

Thursday was a perfect spring day for a long lunchtime walk.

Is the Islamic State Collapsing?

Liz Sly in the Washington Post:

As European governments scramble to contain the expanding terrorist threat posed by the Islamic State, on the battlefield in Iraq and Syria the group is a rapidly diminishing force.

In the latest setbacks for the militants on Thursday, Syrian government troops entered the outskirts of the historic town of Palmyra after a weeks-old offensive aided by Russian airstrikes, and U.S. airstrikes helped Iraqi forces overrun a string of Islamic State villages in northern Iraq that had been threatening a U.S. base nearby.

These are just two of the many fronts in both countries where the militants are being squeezed, stretched and pushed back.­Nowhere are they on the attack. They have not embarked on a successful offensive in nearly nine months. Their leaders are dying in U.S. strikes at the rate of one every three days, inhibiting their ability to launch attacks, according to U.S. military officials.

Front-line commanders no longer speak of a scarily formidable foe but of Islamic State defenses that crumble within days and fighters who flee at the first sign they are under attack.

According to the Pentagon, the IS has lost about half the territory it controlled at its peak in 2014; some of the people Sly consulted think Mosul could be retaken at any time.

If these accounts of decline are true, they are great news, although the IS seems to be compensating for its losses in conventional warfare by ramping up terrorism in Europe and across the Middle East. My hesitation is that all of the people putting out these optimistic assessments have strong interests in their being true – the Pentagon, the Iraqi Army, the Kurds – and they have all underestimated the IS before. We'll know soon enough.

Twitterbot Masters Human Conversation, Offends Everyone

Sometimes truth is better than fiction:

Microsoft set out to learn about “conversational understanding” by creating a bot designed to have automated discussions with Twitter users, mimicking the language they use.

What could go wrong?

If you guessed, “It will probably become really racist,” you’ve clearly spent time on the Internet. Less than 24 hours after the bot, @TayandYou, went online Wednesday, Microsoft halted posting from the account and deleted several of its most obscene statements.

The bot, developed by Microsoft’s technology and research and Bing teams, got major assistance in being offensive from users who egged it on. It disputed the existence of the Holocaust, referred to women and minorities with unpublishable words and advocated genocide. Several of the tweets were sent after users commanded the bot to repeat their own statements, and the bot dutifully obliged.

But Tay, as the bot was named, also seemed to learn some bad behavior on its own. . . . It responded to a question about whether the British actor Ricky Gervais is an atheist by saying: “ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism.”

Microsoft, in an emailed statement, described the machine-learning project as a social and cultural experiment.

Cherry Blossoms

Washington, today.

The Battle of the Tollense River, 1250 BCE

In 1996, an amateur archaeologist found a human arm bone sticking out of the bank of the Tollense River in northern Germany, not far from from the Baltic Sea. That would have been interesting enough, but this arm bone had a flint arrowhead deeply embedded near the upper end.

Further excavations revealed a great mass of bones, at least 130 people, and five horses. The excavators think this is less than 10 percent of the deposit, so this might be a whole lot of dead people. The bones are mostly young men, and many died violently. The excavators have claimed that this is the remains of a single event, a great battle fought where a causeway crossed the marshy river. As many as 4000 men may have participated.

The bones all date to around 1250 BCE. That is well before there were towns or even substantial villages around the Baltic Sea, so to think that a thousand people might have died in a single battle is pretty mind-blowing. Elemental analysis of the bones shows that these men were drawn from a wide area; one of the excavators compared it to the siege of Troy, from which war bands gathered from all over Greece and western Asia Minor. They bore a range of weapons. Some had simple wooden clubs, others stone-headed maces, bronze-tipped spears, or bronze axes. The elite bore bronze swords. Some of their arrows were tipped with stone, others with bronze. These were motley armies, in which farm boys fought beside princes. It is an amazing vision.

At this point, though, the Battle of the Tollense is far from certain. I have written here before about the sacred ponds and bogs where Iron Age Germans sacrificed war captives and offered their war booty, and nothing I have seen yet proves that these men fell here on a single day, rather than being brought here over a period of decades. Some of the dead seem to have washed some distance down the river before fetching up on sand bars, so they may actually have gone into the river somewhere upstrem. Plus, estimating the total number of bodies or anything else in an archaeological deposit is a very iffy business; I have personally said on one day that I was on the edge of a thick, dense midden that stretched across a wide area and then found the far side after just 10 cm more digging.

I have also read contradictory things about the identity of the skeletons; according to some reports the dead include women, old men, and children. There is no reason why an army on the march might not include some women, children, and old men, but this complicates the picture of what happened. Was this an ambush of a marching column, attacked when it was strung out across a bridge? Or was this something other than a pitched battle of two armies?

But this is certainly an amazing find, and a grand battle seems to me to be perfectly defensible explanation, and perhaps even the most likely. The more we learn about the distant past, the more eventful it seems.

Marxists against Trump

Jonathan Chait connects the protesters harassing Donald Trump to the  increasing prominence of Marxism on the left, especially as expressed by the trendy magazine Jacobin:

The efforts to shut down Trump reflect the growing influence of Marxian politics, and these ideas merit study. A Jacobin column defends “impair[ing] the circulation of Trump’s hate-filled message.” What about free speech? Well:

Free speech, while an indispensable principle of democracy, is not an abstract value. It is carried out in the context of power disparities, and has real effects on peoples’ lives. We can defend freedom of speech — particularly from state crackdowns — while also resolutely opposing speech that scapegoats the most vulnerable and oppressed people in our society. 

Free speech is for people on the wrong end of “power disparities” — which is to say, the oppressed and their allies, or, put more bluntly, the left. Free speech is not for a candidate who “scapegoats the most vulnerable and oppressed.” This principle denies the right of free speech not only to Trump but also to the entire Republican Party (whose analysis of poverty, crime, terrorism, and so on constitutes scapegoating of the oppressed) but also large segments of the Democratic Party as well. It is highly unlikely that the illiberal left gets its hands on the machinery of the federal government within our lifetimes, but if it does, repression would be a foregone conclusion.

In the meantime, obviously, Trump poses a far more dire danger than his would-be censors. But it is important not to succumb to the panic that the far left is inculcating around Trump. Trump would threaten American democracy if elected, but all evidence suggests his election is highly unlikely. Trump is disliked by a massive, landslide majority. A majority actually fears him. There is no strategic reason to believe that preventing Trump’s election requires direct confrontation or anything other than normal campaigning. In fact, there is more reason to believe that confrontation helps Trump than to believe the opposite. A poll found the Chicago conflagration made Republican voters, on net, more rather than less likely to support Trump. A reporter I know on the trail met two voters who told him they switched from John Kasich to Trump in response to Trump canceling his speech. That reporter also conveyed the same impression described by Seth Stevenson: Trump’s barking ejections of protesters at his rallies are their emotional apex, the one point in the generally rambly and often boring soliloquies where Trump can demonstrate the atavistic qualities of command. It stands to reason that supplying evidence for Trump’s claim to be the victim of political correctness helps rather than hinders him.

I am not sure if Marxist theories have much influence in America, but there has always been a strong anti-democratic strain on both the far left and the far right in America, so maybe Chait is right that it is never too soon to attack any Marxist seedlings wherever they arise. And I agree completely that the protesters are actually helping Trump; as Lenin would say, they are objectively on his side, no matter what they believe.

Inside that Viking Treasure Pot

Back in 2014 I wrote about the Viking treasure that a metal detectorist found near Dumfries in Scotland. The treasure included this Carolingian pot, which the conservators were having so much trouble opening that they sent it to be CAT scanned to see what was inside.

Now they have opened the pot, and it was full of wonderful things.

Including this Irish silver brooch and the pendant below.

UPDATE: below, three more objects from the hoard, courtesy of the History Blog:

Walking Fish and Convergent Evolution

All land vertebrates descend from ancient fish called tetrapods that moved onto the land around 375 million years ago. So far as we know, this was a unique event, and all amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals descend from one small population of tetrapods.

The fossils of tetrapods show that they moved like modern salamanders, their legs working in pairs, their bodies bending from side to side. To work their hind legs they developed a new bone structure, the pelvis, which is unknown in other fish. Other fish like mudskippers and walking catfish have adapted to move about on land, but they use different methods that seem to be evolutionary dead ends.

But now a blind fish has been identified in deep caves in Thailand that climbs up waterfalls using the same salamander gait as an ancient tetrapod. Cryptotora thamicola is a small fish with two pairs of prominent fins on the sides of its body that serve for legs. It even has a pelvis to operate the hind fins.

It's an amazing example of convergent evolution, that is, the same need giving rise to the same evolutionary changes. That this strange fish has evolved a pelvis and an amphibian gait is about the strongest possible confirmatory evidence that land vertebrates evolved in just the way paleontologists suspected.

Carl Zimmer has more at the Times, including a video of the fish moving.

Paved

The road to hell is paved, not with good intentions, but with self-justification.

–David Mitchell

Thracian Chariot Burial

Karanovo, Bulgaria. From about 500 BCE.

The Infamous Staring Experiment

Most scientists consider psychic powers like ESP and clairvoyance impossible. But some do not, and they regularly do psychic experiments that produce what seem to be positive results. Skeptics who do the same experiments hardly ever get positive results. The result is a grim lesson in the limitations of science as we now practice it. Slate Star Codex considers one famous experiment:

Wiseman & Schlitz’s Experimenter Effects and The Remote Detection Of Staring is my favorite parapsychology paper ever and sends me into fits of nervous laughter every time I read it.

The backstory: there is a classic parapsychological experiment where a subject is placed in a room alone, hooked up to a video link. At random times, an experimenter stares at them menacingly through the video link. The hypothesis is that this causes their galvanic skin response (a physiological measure of subconscious anxiety) to increase, even though there is no non-psychic way the subject could know whether the experimenter was staring or not.

Schiltz is a psi believer whose staring experiments had consistently supported the presence of a psychic phenomenon. Wiseman is a psi skeptic whose staring experiments keep showing nothing and disproving psi. Since they were apparently the only two people in all of parapsychology with a smidgen of curiosity or rationalist virtue, they decided to team up and figure out why they kept getting such different results.

The idea was to plan an experiment together, with both of them agreeing on every single tiny detail. They would then go to a laboratory and set it up, again both keeping close eyes on one another. Finally, they would conduct the experiment in a series of different batches. Half the batches (randomly assigned) would be conducted by Dr. Schlitz, the other half by Dr. Wiseman. Because the two authors had very carefully standardized the setting, apparatus and procedure beforehand, “conducted by” pretty much just meant greeting the participants, giving the experimental instructions, and doing the staring.

The results? Schlitz’s trials found strong evidence of psychic powers, Wiseman’s trials found no evidence whatsoever.

Take a second to reflect on how this makes no sense. Two experimenters in the same laboratory, using the same apparatus, having no contact with the subjects except to introduce themselves and flip a few switches – and whether one or the other was there that day completely altered the result. For a good time, watch the gymnastics they have to do to in the paper to make this sound sufficiently sensical to even get published. This is the only journal article I’ve ever read where, in the part of the Discussion section where you’re supposed to propose possible reasons for your findings, both authors suggest maybe their co-author hacked into the computer and altered the results.

Maybe Wiseman is just such a nice guy, with such a pleasant aura, that his staring isn't menacing enough to set off anyone's psionic stare detectors. But more likely this just points to the same problem with contemporary science that has brought so many psychological results into question.

Fighting Cancer with Poison-Filled Nano-Balls

Interesting news on the cancer front:

For most cancer patients, it’s not the original tumor that poses the greatest risk. It’s the metastases that invade the lung, liver, and other tissues. Now, researchers have come up with an approach that tricks these spinoff tumors into swallowing poison. So far the strategy has only been tested in mice, where it proved highly effective. But the results are promising enough that the researchers are planning to launch clinical trials in cancer patients within a year. . . .

The new therapy is based on a drug called called doxorubicin, or dox. This is a common agent in chemotherapy because it binds to DNA and keeps tumor cells from dividing. However, it is just as toxic to certain regular cells as it is to cancer cells, especially cells in the heart. So patients often have to discontinue treatment because of heart issues. So it would be nice to deliver it directly to cancer cells:

Hoping to provide such cell specificity, researchers led by Mauro Ferrari, a nanomedicine expert, as well as president and CEO of the Houston Methodist Research Institute in Texas, have spent years developing porous silicon particles as drug carriers. The particles’ micrometer-scale size and disklike shape allows them travel unimpeded through normal blood vessels. But when they hit blood vessels around tumors, which are typically malformed and leaky, the particles fall out of the circulation and pool near the tumor. That was step one in delivering chemotherapeutic drugs to their target. But just filling such particles with dox doesn’t do much good, Ferrari says. Even if a small amount of the drug finds its way inside tumor cells, those cells often have membrane proteins that act as tiny pumps to push the drug back outside the cell before it can do any damage.

To get large amounts of dox inside the metastatic tumor cells and then past the protein pumps, Ferrari and colleagues linked numerous dox molecules to stringlike molecules called polymers. They then infused the dox-carrying polymers into their silicon microparticles and injected them into mice that had been implanted with human metastatic liver and lung tumors. As with the previous studies, the researchers found that the silicon particles congregated in and around tumor sites, and once there the particles slowly degraded over 2 to 4 weeks.

As they did so, the silicon particles released the dox-carrying polymer strands. In the watery environment around tumor cells, the strands coiled up into tiny balls, each just 20–80 nanometers across. That size, Ferrari says, is ideal, because it’s the same size as tiny vesicles that are commonly exchanged between neighboring cells as part of their normal chemical communication. In this case, the dox-polymer balls were readily taken up by tumor cells. Once there, a large fraction was carried internally away from the dox-exporting pumps at cell membrane and toward the nucleus. Ferrari says at this point his team isn’t sure exactly why the dox-laden balls are ferried toward the nucleus, though this is exactly what they wanted.

Not only is the region around the nucleus devoid of dox-removing pumps, but it typically has a more acidic environment than near the cell membrane. And Ferrari’s team used this to their advantage as well. They designed the chemical links between dox molecules and the polymer to dissolve under acidic conditions. This releases the dox at the site where its cell killing potency is highest.

Up to 50% of cancer-bearing mice given the treatment showed no signs of metastatic tumors 8 months later, the researchers report today in Nature Biotechnology. In humans, Ferrari says, that’s equivalent to being cancer-free for 24 years. “If this research bears out in humans and we see even a fraction of this survival time, we are still talking about dramatically extending life for many years,” Ferrari says. “That’s essentially providing a cure in a patient population that is now being told there is none.”

Amazing, the things we can do. On the other hand, we're still not very good at fighting most dangerous cancers, so we'll have to see if these nano-particle approaches can be made to work.

The Massacre of the Innocents

Tapestry from the Medici works in Florence, 16th century.

Trump's Strategy

Slate Star Codex was curious enough about Trump to read The Art of the Deal (published in 1988), and he extracted some good bits. First, here is Trump's basic formula for success:

One thing I’ve learned about the press is that they’re always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational the better. It’s in the nature of the job, and I understand that. The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you…

The other thing I do when I talk with reporters is to be straight. I try not to deceive them or to be defensive, because those are precisely the ways most people get themselves into trouble with the press. Instead, when a reporter asks me a tough question, I try to frame a positive answer, even if that means shifting the ground. For example, if someone asks me what negative effects the world’s tallest building might have on the West Side, I turn the tables and talk about how New Yorkers deserve the world’s tallest building, and what a boost it will give the city to have it again. When a reporter asks why I build only for the rich, I note that the rich aren’t the only ones who benefit from my buildings. I explain that I put thousands of people to work who might otherwise be collecting unemployment, and that I add to the city’s tax base every time I build a new project. I also point out that buildings like Trump Tower have helped spark New York’s renaissance.

The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.

I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration – and a very effective form of promotion.

That explains a lot. On the other hand:

You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.

I think of Jimmy Carter. After he lost the election to Ronald Reagan, Carter came to see me in my office. He told me he was seeking contributions to the Jimmy Carter Library. I asked how much he had in mind. And he said, “Donald, I would be very appreciative if you contributed five million dollars.”

I was dumbfounded. I didn’t even answer him.

But that experience also taught me something. Until then, I’d never understood how Jimmy Carter became President. The answer is that as poorly qualified as he was for the job, Jimmy Carter had the nerve, the guts, the balls, to ask for something extraordinary. That ability above all helped him get elected president. But then, of course, the American people caught on pretty quickly that Carter couldn’t do the job, and he lost in a landslide when he ran for reelection.

Ronald Reagan is another example. He is so smooth and so effective a performer that he completely won over the American people. Only now, nearly seven years later, are people beginning to question whether there’s anything beneath that smile.

I wonder what goods Trump is planning to deliver?

Midlife

The sowing is behind; now is the time to reap. The run has been taken; now is the time to leap. Preparation has been made; now is the time for the venture of the work itself.

– Karl Barth

The Last Contested Convention

Interesting narrative from a Republican veteran:

When the Republican convention opened in Chicago on July 7, 1952, Taft's forces controlled its machinery. Taft led in committed delegates but not enough to be nominated. Some 70 were in dispute.

Rules and credentials were the center of the struggle even as policy issues fueled intense emotion. There was even a bitter two-hour debate over which rules the convention should follow.

I was on the floor of the convention during this debate. My father was a Utah Taft delegate. I was a volunteer teenager for Taft along with Yvonne Romney, the young daughter of the Taft western regional chairman; the campaign gave us signs reading, "Utah Bees Buzz For Taft." We were told to march in front of the New York delegates, who were seated on the convention floor directly facing the speaker's podium.

As we innocently paraded in front of Dewey and his delegates, Illinois Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen, in a booming voice from the podium, roused the Taft delegates and pointed his finger down at Dewey, shouting: "We followed you before, and you took us down the road to defeat. Don't do this to us."

The convention erupted. Delegates booed, rising to their feet and screaming epithets at Dewey. Republicans' pent-up bitterness over the 1948 loss overflowed, resulting in long, heartrending screeching.

I too was overwhelmed and vehemently waved my sign at the New Yorkers. A man, at least a foot taller than my 5 feet, leaped out of the New York delegation, yelling, "Hey, girlie, how much did they pay you for that?"

I was furious. The idea that anyone would pay me to do my patriotic duty was more than I could stand. I hit him with the sign, shouting something about how dare you say such things.

My Taft buddies and a security guard escorted me gently off the floor. I was okay, more angry than frightened. Not until later when I learned of other violent incidents — less modest than mine — did I realize how dangerous the convention floor had become.

The next day, after a long battle over whose delegates would be recognized, the balloting began.

At the end of the first ballot, Eisenhower was nine votes short of the required number for nomination. The governors of Minnesota and Maryland changed their votes for Eisenhower. Dewey and his team had again defeated Taft.

Maybe Trump is right that his people would riot if he were denied the nomination.

In the rest of the article the author emphasizes that the convention ended peacefully partly because both Eisenhower and Taft were very calm men completely opposed to any sort of convention floor shenanigans, making the implicit comparison with Trump.

I have to think that more Republicans are afraid of a convention disaster than are afraid of Trump, so I expect a first ballot win for him even if he doesn't have all the delegates he needs when the primaries end.

The Wave Pilots

Fascinating look at how people in the Marshall Islands used to navigate around these remote specks of land by feeling the waves:

The Marshalls provide a crucible for navigation: 70 square miles of land, total, comprising five islands and 29 atolls, rings of coral islets that grew up around the rims of underwater volcanoes millions of years ago and now encircle gentle lagoons. These green dots and doughnuts make up two parallel north-south chains, separated from their nearest neighbors by a hundred miles on average. Swells generated by distant storms near Alaska, Antarctica, California and Indonesia travel thousands of miles to these low-lying spits of sand. When they hit, part of their energy is reflected back out to sea in arcs, like sound waves emanating from a speaker; another part curls around the atoll or island and creates a confused chop in its lee. Wave-piloting is the art of reading — by feel and by sight — these and other patterns. Detecting the minute differences in what, to an untutored eye, looks no more meaningful than a washing-machine cycle allows a ri-meto, a person of the sea in Marshallese, to determine where the nearest solid ground is — and how far off it lies — long before it is visible.

Sadly this knowledge is nearly extinct, and you have to wonder how long it will survive in a world of cheap GPS devices.

Dragon Ladle

China, 220-280 CE. In the Met.

Clintonism and the Future of the Democratic Party

In 1984, Ronald Reagan won a huge landslide victory, sweeping 49 states while running on an unapologetic conservative platform. In the wake of that humiliation, Democrats began  to think about what they needed to do to retake the White House. One result was the Democratic Leadership Council, a cabal of moderate Democrats who eventually helped Bill Clinton win the 1992 election. Clinton practiced a strategy dubbed triangulation, in which he placed himself between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, tacking back and forth as required to remain in power.

The most important issues on which Bill Clinton turned conservative were trade, crime, welfare, and Wall Street regulation. In 1992 Americans were seriously freaked about the great crime wave (even though it had already crested and started to recede), and the every night the news was full of  "wildings" and "superpredators" and speculation about whether crime would render cites like New York and Washington uninhabitable. Clinton's plans to jail more offenders and put more police on the street were among his most popular policies. As for welfare, even many liberals were unhappy about Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which provided subsidies targeted to single mothers at a time when everyone was worried about falling marriage rates, so Clinton was able to get liberal think tank types and Congressional experts to work with him on his reform. Wall Street deregulation looms very large in the wake of 2008, but I don't remember it being nearly as controversial as some of Clinton's other policies. The reform was sold as a necessary update to outdated 1930s laws that didn't even mention things like hedge funds that had become central to modern investing. So some update was obviously needed, and I am not sure how many people understood at the time how much dangerous deregulation was snuck into the law. NAFTA was certainly very controversial, but at that time all the economists (even Robert Reich and Paul Krugman) were sold on the orthodoxy that trade promoted growth, and their arguments overrode opposition from labor unions (which were then at their nadir of  popularity).

Clinton's program seemed relatively successful against the backdrop of economic boom times, but really nobody liked it. Conservatives continued to hate Democrats on principle and liberals accepted Clinton's compromises only because the only alternative seemed to be a return to Reaganism. In the 1990s, liberals simply did not have the votes to win national elections.

What about now? Have things changed?

Certainly they have in the Democratic Party. Glancing at the primary results you have to think that if Bernie Sanders can get 45% of the vote, a more plausible New Deal candidate would be running away with the race. The belief among older Democrats that Clinton/Obama centrism is the best America can do is being elbowed aside by young activists who want a return to both the economic populism of the 30s and the race agitation of the 60s. It looks like Hillary is set to win this year's race, but the future of Democratic moderation is dim. Whether or not she becomes president, the Democratic party is sure to be pushed leftward. I venture to predict that the next Democratic presidential candidate after Hillary will be somebody much to the left of Obama and the Clintons.

As to how that candidate will do in the election, I have no idea. It certainly seems that most Americans want a change from the politics of the last 36 years, something that will favor ordinary people and do less for the rich. Whether a majority can be persuaded that Democratic Socialism is that new politics remains to be seen. For one thing, Democrats have not tried to raise taxes on people earning less than $250,000 a year, and ambitious social policies like free college or more expansive health reform will require it. If a Democrat can win the White House on a platform of tax increases for everyone, a new world will open up. If not, then Republicans will sweep back in, and Democrats will be forced back again into a mode of supporting candidates and platforms that they really despise.

My New Calling

I just found this description of Aldous Huxley, by Antonio Melechi:

there was certainly no denying the staggering panorama of ideas that Huxley, a self-styled professor of nothing in particular, could navigate in his fiction.

So now when people ask what I do, I will answer "I'm a self-styled professor of nothing in particular."

Goths vs. Greeks in the 260s CE

The Roman Empire went through a major crisis in the third century CE, when much of the empire was overrun by invaders. In response to this many cities hundreds of miles from the frontier built new walls, a real sign that the Pax Romana was fraying. These invasions were eventually turned back, but not until great damage had been done. This is a poorly-documented part of the empire's history; there are no surviving accounts of those events by major contemporary historians, nor any very detailed treatments by later writers. Which makes the discovery of a contemporary account in a palimpsest – a manuscript that had been erased and written over – a significant event in ancient studies. The palimpsest in question is in Vienna, and a piece of it is shown above.

The text in question is thought to be part of a work called the Scythica by the Greek writer Dexippus. It describes in invasion of Greece by an army of Goths, including a battle in the famous pass of Thermopylae (above). An English translation of the whole passage has been published in the Journal of Roman Studies, and I would love to see it if any of my friends has access. LiveScience offers this summary:

At the start of the fragment, "battle columns" of Goths are attacking the Greek city of Thessalonica.

"Making an assault upon the city of the Thessalonians, they tried to capture it as a close-packed band," Dexippus wrote of the attack, as translated by Mallan and Davenport. "Those on the walls defended themselves valiantly, warding off the battle columns with the assistance of many hands."

Unable to capture Thessalonica, the Goth force turned south toward Athens, "envisioning the gold and silver votive offerings and the many processional goods in the Greek sanctuaries, for they learned that the region was exceedingly wealthy in this respect," Dexippus wrote.

A Greek force assembled at the narrow pass of Thermopylae in an attempt to stop the Gothic advance. "Some [of the Greeks] carried small spears, others axes, others wooden pikes overlaid with bronze and with iron tips, or whatever each man could arm himself with," Dexippus wrote. "When they came together, they completely fortified the perimeter wall and devoted themselves to its protection with haste."

Dexippus then offers a speech that he assigns to a Greek commander named Marianus, who tried to rally his men by reminding them of the battles their ancestors had fought at Thermopylae in the past, including the famous fifth-century B.C. battle against the Persians (The 300, etc.).

"O Greeks, the occasion of our preservation for which you are assembled and the land in which you have been deployed are both truly fitting to evoke the memory of virtuous deeds," Marianus' speech to his troops reads, as translated from the fragment. "For your ancestors, fighting in this place in former times, did not let Greece down and deprive it of its free state.

"In previous attacks, you seemed terrifying to the enemies," said Marianus. "On account of these things, future events do not appear to me not without hope …"

The fragment ends before the completion of Marianus' speech, and the outcome of the battle is uncertain, researchers said.

Well, that's disappointing. We are left in suspense, until some other fragment appears a few decades from now. Or perhaps forever.

Another fragment of Dexippus resurrected from the same manuscript describes an earlier battle against Goths fought by the Emperor Decius, who reigned from 249 to 251. In the speech Dexippus wrote for Decius, the emperor says,

Men, I wish the military force and all the provincial territory were in a good condition and not humiliated by the enemy. But since the incidents of human life bring manifold sufferings … it is the duty of prudent men to accept what happens and not to lose their spirit, nor become weak.

Doesn't he look like a man who would make world-weary pronouncements like that? I plan to drag this out whenever any of my children starts whining.

Ödön Lechner, Two Museums in Budapest

Toward the end of the nineteenth century European architects tired of the historical styles that had dominated the past hundred years: Neo-Gothic, Neoclassical, Neo-Palladian. They experimented more boldly with new forms, sometimes employing unusual shapes made possible by the strength of steel frames. In France this was called Art Nouveau; in Germany, Jugendstil; in Hungary is was called szecesszió, or Secession, after the artistic movements that "seceded" from the grand salons that had set tastes through the first half of the century. One of the masters of szecesszió was Ödön Lechner (1845-1914).

Hungarian art fans are extremely proud of Lechner, and have applied to make six of his buildings in Hungary into a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Their application paints Lechner as a great pioneer:

In the pre-modern era, when the replication of historic styles had become meaningless, the mastery of artistic and stylistic traditions had become second-rate, and architecture's new technical possibilities demanded new forms, Lechner exploited the stylistic vacuum and produced a new independent regional style of construction, anticipating the great individuals of world architecture. By revaluating vernacular motifs, he elevated them and placed them into the realm of monumental architecture. By searching for a connection between Eastern ornamentation and Hungarian forms he created a distinctive architecture and also enriched universal culture through the artistic philosophy of his creative art. Through his spirited architectural fantasies and his influence on numerous followers he created outstanding cultural treasures that demand the attention of all humanity.

I don't know that Lechner was such a great radical – he studied Art Nouveau when he worked in Paris between 1875 and 1878 – but I love some of his buildings. Today I feature two of his museums, both in Budapest. First, the Museum of Applied Arts, built in 1893-1896. Lechner loved the rugged, high-fired, ornamental tiles made by the Zsolnay Company, and he used them for most of his roofs and some walls as well.

In the museum's atrium you can see Lechner's use of curving Persian or Moorish forms (above and top), with a glass roof supported by curving steel beams.

Famous ceiling decorated in a semi-Persian style.

This building had fallen into disrepair, and a major renovation effort was launched a few years ago, so I would check on the status of the renovations before planning a visit; it might all be covered in scaffolding.

But it is certainly well worth preserving.

Not far away is another Lechner masterpiece, the Geological Museum, built 1896-1899.

Roof, showing more Zsolnay tiles.

Interior views.

A remarkable building, and more reason to mourn that instead of following the lines laid out in the Art Nouveau era architecture moved in the direction of strict Bauhaus formalism. Think how much more beautiful the world might be.

I was inspired to write about Lechner by this series of photographs of ten Art Nouveau buildings in Budapest, by Bódis Krisztián.