Links 13 February 2026

Frankish Pendant, c. 600 AD

Reasoning failures in LLMs, major new paper; summary on Twitter/X: "LLMs reason just enough to sound convincing, but not enough to be reliable."

Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.

Interesting review of a book called How Africa Works, with some nice African success stories.

Sabine Hossenfelder against panic over microplastics, 6-minute video.

The mysterious Sabians of Harran, who may have been practitioners of ancient Mesopotamian paganism who endured into medieval times. (one-hour video, wikipedia, detailed article with illustrations)

Yuval Harari on Big Think, talking about information and civilization in the age of AI.

Why only three countries bother building ships any more, 20-minute video. (Because shipbuilding is hugely capital intensive and they make next to no money.)

The strange episode of Mao's Mango Mania.

Alex Tabarrok has spent decades complaining that the FDA is too restrictive and paternalistic, and he had hopes for improvement under Trump, but now the FDA is refusing to license mRNA vaccines no matter how strong the data supporting them because their leadership just hates mRNA technology.

Perun on the disaster that was Trump's Greenland power grab, one-hour-video.

NASA reports on an "Earth-like" but very cold planet.

Tyler Cowen on why Americans don't talk about Singapore any more.

But wait! Singapore is having great success controlling mosquitos by releasing sterile males. (Government web site, Twitter/X)

Somebody paid $27.2 million for Michelangelo’s drawing of a foot, $1.15m per square inch. It is a study for the Sistine Chapel, but still. At that price the Sistine Chapel ceiling, roughly 12,000 square feet, would go for $2 billion. A bargain!

Noah Smith on Japan in the Takaichi Era.

The transformation of Sparrows Point in Baltimore from a dying steel mill complex to a logistics hub called TradePoint, 10-minute video.

Paleontologists love fossilized predator vomit.

I have noted here before that the art of ancient cultures in coastal Peru hints at an amazing, Baroque mythology, but we don't have enough information to understand it. Some archaeologists think this relief carving is an importan clue.

An economist uses AI to produce a "decent" paper in three hours. (Twitter/X) Via Marginal Revolution.

The more planetary systems we learn about, the less we understand about how they form.

Static electricity is a minor nuisance to us, but for tiny animals these effects can be very important, e.g., nematodes use static elecricity to fly. (Article, 13-minute video)

Peru's burgeoning blueberry trade, fascinating.

An argument that taxation was a factor in the French Revolution; says that there were more riots etc. in areas with higher taxes.

"Switzerland will hold a referendum in June on whether to cap its population at 10 million until 2050 by limiting immigration." (NY Times, CNN)

Your regular reminder that we know why the number thirteen has long been considered unlucky. I keep posting this link because I see nonsense all over the internet every Friday the 13th, including from people who call themselves academics.

The Russian Navy is in a heap of trouble: humiliated by Ukraine, with no money to repair their aging ships or enough men to crew them. (article 1, article 2, article 3)

The modern defense industrial base: "The Ukrainian company SkyFall now produces 100,000 “Vampire” heavy bomber drones per year, at a unit cost of $8,500."

Americans Think Everyone is Corrupt Because it Can't Be Their Own Fault

Matt Yglesias has a good piece today on why so many Americans think all politicians are "corrupt." For one thing, Americans have a very broad view of "corruption":

Searchlight did not make a chart out of these results, but they also asked respondents whether various actions constituted corruption. Voters of course view things like taking bribes or handing out jobs to unqualified friends as corrupt. But they also, by overwhelming margins, say that “government officials voting the way elites in their social group want instead of what most people in their district want” is a form of corruption.

So if a Democrat running in Iowa or Ohio has an unpopular view on affirmative action in college admissions or transgender athletes on school sports teams or late-term abortions, that’s not a consideration to weigh against outrage at Republicans’ covering for Trump’s corruption. It’s corruption on its own terms.

My views are obviously correct, so everyone who disagrees with me is corrupt!

You see this all over the discourse. E.g., people pushing for more housing construction instead of rent control must be taking money from billionaire developers. (People say this on Twitter/X a thousand times a day.) Or doctors pushing vaccines must be on the take for Big Pharma. To some people the idea that, no, other people actually disagree with you is beyond conception.

The basic shape of this is that just holding an unpopular view is corrupt. I suppose you could try to plead to the voters that your support of Policy X has nothing to do with donor influence or social elites. But if you support Policy X, then of course economic and social elites who agree with you about X will contribute money to your campaign and say nice things about you. There’s no way that you’re ever going to be able to prove that your support for a ban on single-use plastic straws reflects a sincere assessment of the public interest rather than the influence of climate donors and green-minded cultural elites.

To get to one of my own themes, people often blame politicians for not solving problems because they think our problems would not be hard to solve:

Most people believe that public policy problems are not actually difficult, and that if people of goodwill sat around the table and cooperated, they could be solved. Think about the scene in the movie “Dave” where, through a weird series of events, a non-politician ends up serving as president. He brings in his friend — a skilled and experienced accountant — to audit the books and finds that he can easily balance the budget without making any painful tradeoffs.

I once had an extended argument with an engineer who insisted that we know how to fix American education and the only reason we haven't is the power of teachers' unions. Even Elon Musk seemed to think for while that we could balance our budget by eliminating "fraud and corruption" from Social Security.

But I would take this even deeper. I think many people see the world as cleanly divided into US the THEM, and since WE are good, all our problems must be caused by THEM.

For a while we were supposed to tell kids about "stranger danger," as if wandering psychos were the biggest threat to their well-being. Actually most children who are sexually abused are abused by people very close to them – parents, step-parents, coaches, teachers – and most children who are murdered are killed by their parents.

Millions of Americans seem to believe that immigrants commit most of our crimes; two white Americans have flat out denied to me that a majority of American felons are white. Many Republicans believe that felons vote for Democrats, but so far as we can tell felons vote just like everyone else of their own sex and race, so a group that is majority white men of course votes for Republicans.

So if our budget is out of balance, it can't be because of good hard-working heritage Americans. It must be because of corrupt Somali refugees or Mexican cartels or so-called allies who won't pay their share or sinister billionaires just back from Epstein Island. The solution is to punish the villains and put good, honest people in charge.

In our time this might be the most dangerous fantasy in the world. 

Art of Ancient Persia at the Met

Cat rhyton, Parthian, 1st century BC

Plate with a hunting scene from the tale of Bahram Gur and Azadeh, Sasanian, ca. 5th century CE, and detail

Belt clasp, Parthian 1st to 2nd century AD

Sassanian sword and scabbard, 7th century AD, detail

Achaemenid plaque with "horned lion-griffons," 5th or 4th century BC.

Achaemenid gold vessel in the shape of a "fantastic leonine creature"

Parthian sculpture of a standing man, 2nd century AD

Detail of a plate showing a king hunting, Sassanian, 6th century AD

What's in a Medieval Arabic Grimoire

Yes, Grimoires were real things. The word just means "grammar" in medieval French, and its use to designate magical texts is not especially old, dating perhaps to the 1600s. But books of magical instruction are ancient and examples survive from Indonesia to Iceland. If, like me, you try to read them without believing that this stuff is going to work, you will likely find them impenetrably obscure and deathly boring. This may have been intentional; all the famous grimoires have introductions explaining that the books' contents are only for adepts who are intellectually and spiritually prepared for the journey.

But YouTubers who talk about arcane religious topic love them, so I have lately been able to learn a great deal about them in a pleasant way. (I recommend Let's Talk Religion.)  The most influential of the medieval Arabic grimoires was the Shams al Ma'arif, or Sun of Knowledge, supposedly written by the Sufi scholar Ahmad al Buni (died 1225). But it was not written by al Buni, any more than the equally famous Picatrix was written by Aristotle. The actual authors of these texts were not keen to draw attention to themselves.

The Shams al Ma'arif has long been considered a cursed book, dangerous to read or even to own. One of the YouTubers I listened to warned his readers when he was about to quote from it, so that any who feared the curse could skip that section. But I have no fear of weird old books, so let's dive in and see what this book, and other like it, actually say.

The first chapters describe how to construct magic squares, that is, squares of numbers that add up to the same sum in any direction. Really. As I have noted here before, this old trick of arithmetic has some kind of hold on the minds of many people.

Then we move onto astrology. This is the real meat of the work, and if you are not prepared for it you will likely be astonished at how much medieval magic is just about ways to leverage astrology. This focus is ancient; our oldest detailed spell books, in Babylonian, are equally focused on astrology. Astral magic is likely another of the Sumerians' legacies to the later western world.

If you ask, where does the power come from that magicians wield, the basic answer is, from the stars and especially the planets. (Actually it derives from the One, which the Muslims equated with God, from which it emanates through a bunch of levels and powers and thus into the mortal world, but in practice you get it from the heavens.)

You leverage this power through correspondences. That is, you find things that are mystically connected to the power you want to draw on, and construct a chain that binds that power into some object. Like this:

To harness the power of Jupiter, which has a protective and fortunate quality, you construct a magic square. Take the letter associated with Jupiter, Dal, which has the numerical value of four. Make a four by four magic square. Then you write the letter itself, Dal, thirty-five times, which is the numerical value of the letter Dal written out as it is pronounced, Dal-Alif-Lam. You can also write various names of God that include that letter, such as al wadoud, “the Loving.” You then inscribe this talismanic symbol when the Moon is in a good and fortunate mansion in the sky, on a parchment or any other object that you can carry with you or hang over your door. You can also write it out with ink, then dissolve the ink in water and drink it. Thus one has harnessed the power Jupiter by using the infinite thread of correspondences, from the sphere of Jupiter to the letter associated with that sphere to the numerical value of that letter to the names of God that include that letter and so on.

Each of the planets is also associated with a metal (Jupiter is tin), so you could add another correspondence by making your object out of that metal.

Notice the emphasis on the names of God, of course an important theme in Islam. The reason al Buni had this magical text foisted on him is likely that he did write a Sufi text about meditation on the names of God, and this text ascribes semi-magical effects to the names and the letters that make them up. This aspect of relatively orthodox Islam was coopted into the ancient system of astral magic as another sort of correspondence.

If you want to do harmful magic, you can, for example use all these correspondences to bind the power of Mars or Saturn (in an unfavorable aspect) to a doll, which you then torture or maim and bury it near the victim's house, or in a place he will surely walk over. 

If you want a woman to love you, you draw on the power of Venus (in a favorable aspect) and somehow channel that power either into an amulet that you wear, or something that you introduce to the victim, e.g., by burying it where she will walk.

The point is to draw on astral power through correspondences and find some way to direct that power toward the desired beneficiary or victim.

Oh my sagely readers, now that you have entered into the house of those that know, go forth and do magic to make the world better.

Lourenço da Silva de Mendouça

Lourenço da Silva de Mendouça was born around 1650 in the Kingdom of Ndongo in what is now Angola.  Lourenço was the grandson of the King of Pongo, known in our sources as either King Hari or Philipe I. Hari/Philipe ruled from 1626 to 1664 over a breakway state that maintained its independence from Ndongo by allying with the Portuguese. As Portuguese allies, the royal family all of course converted to Catholicism. When Philipe I died, he was succeeded by one of his son, Dom João. According to wikipedia, 

Dom João refused the annual tax of 100 slaves demanded by the colonisers, known as baculamento, and declared war against the Portuguese. 

The Portuguese won the war and decided to send the rebel's family into exile in Brazil. They were not enslaved but lived in rather comfortable circumstances; Mendonça studied in a Catholic seminary. But the Brazilian authorities got suspicious of these African nobles, fearing in particular that they might ally with a free nation of maroons known as the Quilombo dos Palmares. (Maroons who disappeared into the jungle were a major feature of colonial Brazil, and some of their communities endured long enough to have their rights to their land recognized by a left-wing government in the 1990s.) So they split up the family, sending Lourenço and some others to Portugal.

Wikipedia again:

Mendonça was sent to the Convent of Vilar de Frades, in Braga, where he studied for three or four years, before moving to Lisbon.

Notice the importance of noble blood in this world. Mendonça may have been an African, but he was a prince (and a Catholic), so nobody expected him to work for a living. 

Lisbon at that time had a significant black population, estimated at 5 to 10 percent, so the Pumbo royals were hardly alone in their situation. Many of Portugal's Africans joined confraternities, lay Catholic organizations officially devoted to chartity but also functioning as social clubs. In about 1681 Mendonça became the procurator general of the Confraternity of Our Lady, Star of the Negroes, a trans-Atlantic group that also existed in Brazil.

During all of these travels, Mendonça seems to have been working on a legal brief accusing Portugal and Spain of a great crime, the Atlantic slave trade. In 1684 he was able to travel to Rome and present his brief to the papal curia. Mendonça's brief was particularly strong on the gruesome tortures the Portuguese regularly inflicted on rebellious slaves. Mendonça's brief helped to convince Pope Innocent XI to issue a letter reiterating previous Papal condemnations against enslaving Christians and cruelty to slaves. He did not, however, condemn slavery itself.

Mendonça died in Rome in 1698.

You Think this is Criticism, but —

NY Times:

Trump Is a Global ‘Wrecking Ball,’ European Security Experts Say

I know Trump supporters who would say, YES!!! The global order is a grotesque disaster and we elected Trmp to wreck it.

Support for Trump is driven precisely by the belief that things are terrible. Calling him a "wrecking ball" only encourages him and his fans.

What is needed is to somehow convince people that things are not bad and don't need wrecking. Assuming that is true does not help.

Government Measures Influence the Timing of Births More than the Total Number

From an excellent, detailed article on recent human fertility, I extract this graph. In 1967 the dictatorship in Romania banned abortion and modern contraception. The result was a birth boom. But the boom was short-livedd and a sharp decline soon followed. Comparison with Bulgaria, another communist government with a similar economy, shows that Romanian policy had little impact on completed cohort fertility (the number of babies women have over the course of their lifetimes). Women who had babies in 1968 just had fewer babies later.

This seems to be happening in Hungary now. The government's birth subsidies did encourage women to have babies, but now fertility is falling again and it seems those were just babies women were planning to have at some point down the road.

Via Marginal Revolution.

Lugdunum: Roman Lyons

The Vaise Treasure, buried around AD 260 and excavated in 1992

Lugdunum, modern Lyon, France, was in Roman times the greatest city of northwestern Europe, with a population of about 70,000. It was founded in about 43 BC as a settlement of veterans from Caesar's wars. The spot is such a great one – at the confluence of two significant rivers, perfectly positioned to control overland trade from the Mediterrean to Gaul and Britain – that it ought to have beeen settled a long time before that. Archaeologists, alas, have had a hard time documenting this. There seems to have been a small settlement on a nearby hill, but when people dig in the rest of the Roman city all they find is Roman stuff. Numerous stray artifacts from the Iron Age have turned up, but no little evidence of buildings. One interesting thing that has been found is pits full of animal bones, such as might be left from a great feast. So the reigning theory is that in the Iron Age most of the site was a sort of fair ground where people from north and south met to trade and feast, kept neutral by not allowing anyone to build there.

Roman Lugdunum grew rapidly. It got a big boost from Augustus' campaign to conquer Germania, which began in 20 BC. Lugdunum became a major supply hub, and a network of roads was built or improved radiating out from the city in all directions. By 10 BC the city had a major aqueduct and a theater that seated 4,500.

Emperor Claudius – above, on a coin minted in Lugdunum – had a great bridge built across the river, which required sinking the pylons deep through the swampy ground.

One of the most famous objects in the Lugdunum Musée et Théâtres Romains is the Sarcophagus with the Triumph of Bacchus, carved around 200 AD and found in 1845.

Bronze statue of Neptune known as the Neptune of Lyon.

Part of the Claudian Table, a large bronze plaque recording a speech Emperor Claudius gave at Lugdunum in 48 AD, found in 1526.

The "swastika mosaic," excavated in 1911 from a grand villa within the city.

Map of the Roman city.

The Circus Mosaic. Wish I were going to this museum today instead of what I have to do.

The Evidence

Americand Sour on Both Parties

Voters are telling pollsters that both parties are "too extreme."

The Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Generator

Many electrical technologies – coal, oil, fission, fusion – really just produce heat that is used to boil water, which is then used to drive steam turbines. It is the spinning blades of the turbine that actually generate the electricity. This is a great technology, and we have gotten really good at building steam turbines after 200 years of practice.

But that doesn't make it the best technology for converting heat into electricity.

This brings us to the a new(ish) technology that may turn out to be much more efficient: the supercritical CO2 generator. These are similar to steam turbines but instead of water they use supercritical CO2. "Supercritical" means that the carbon dioxide is heated and compressed (84C, 74 atmospheres) until it turns into a "supercritical" state, sort of a very dense gas that behaves like a liquid. This dense fluid can spin turbine blades more efficiently than steam, and it does not lose energy to the phase transition (liquid to gas) that uses up a lot of energy in a steam engine. Because the CO2 is so much denser, these turbines can be much, much smaller than those using steam:

The 10 MW US$155-million Supercritical Transformational Electric Power (STEP) pilot plant was completed in 2023 in San Antonio. It is the size of a desk and can power around 10,000 homes. [top photo]

The US Department of Energy has been funding research in this area for decades. The biggest problem they found was that supercritical CO2 corrodes steel, so that however efficiently it generated power, the system could not be made reliable or stable. Then a decade or so ago Sandia National Laboratory discovered that certain kinds of nickel steel were not degraded by supercritical CO2, and this launched a worldwide spate of experiments and innovations. Recently commercial generators have gone online in both the US and China, with claims that they are up to 50 percent more efficient that steam turbines.

This is the Chinese entry, a recently announced 30 MW system in a steel plant, which is using waste heat to generate power for the grid.

Technological doomsterism is silly. We can generate all the energy we need, without CO2 emissions, whever we decide to do so.

(16-minute video, short article, wikipedia)

The Emerald Tablet

The Emerald Tablet is a brief alchemical text that was included in some of the earliest Arabic treatises on alchemy, such as the Book of the Secret of Creation and the Book of the Secret of Secrets. These texts date to the eighth and nineth centuries. The text (above) was supposed to have been written by the legendary sage Hermes Trismegistus. Wikipedia has the whole text in translation; the most famous line is "the uppermost is from the lowermost and the lowermost is from the uppermost."

The best thing about this text it is the story of its discovery, which was included in both of those key Arabic manuscripts. The text was supposed to come from an actual emerald tablet that was found in the hand of a corpse lying on the floor of a tomb, in front of a statue of Hermes Trismegistus. In one manuscript this was the tomb of Hermes himself.

Which is the most Dungeons & Dragons story I know from the whole medieval age.

Stained Glass at the Met

Theodosius Arrives at Ephesus, from the Legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. Franch, c. 1200 AD

Two Saints, German, 1440-1460, and detail

Valentin Bousch, The Deluge, 1531, and detail

Dirck Vellert, Martyrdom of the Maccabees, c. 1535, and details

The Moneychangers in the Temple, German, 16th century

John La Farge, Peonies Blown in the Wind, and detail, ca. 1880 

John La Farge, Welcome, Window from the Mrs. George T. Bliss House, New York, 1908–9

Elon for Immigration

There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley. 

– Elon Musk

This was in response to a poster who asked, "Genuinely curious: Are there actual instances where qualified native born Americans couldn’t get jobs in tech because foreigners took all of them? I’d be surprised if it’s true because at any given point there are hundreds of thousands of unfilled jobs in tech."

Links 6 February 2026

The "Crying Horse" plushy toy has become a runaway hit with young adults in China. It's not just Americans who are really grumpy these days.

This Paleolithic teenager might have been mauled to death by a cave bear. But we got them in the end.

Meta-study finds that sperm counts are not declining. (Twitter/X)

Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.

Scott Siskind explores Moltbook, a social network for AI agents, very strange.

A lengthy argument that the NIH should fund trials of un-patentable medications, since the drug companies will not. The NIH has done this at least once, showing that an old, off-patent drug was better than the new, expensive alternative, and this saved the government billions.

The Syrian government reaches agreement with the country's largest Kurdish faction, reducing the chance of civil war. (NY Times, Reuters)

A post from 2017 that is highly relevant, "Opening Fire."

And another from 2012: Fear of Outsiders and American Mass Murder. I find that everything I want to say about America right now I have said before. The warning signs have been there for 15 years.

Past and future: fusing AI and traditional Chinese medicine. Via Marginal Revolution.

The life and teachings of Ramakrishna (1836-1886), an illiterate mystic who became one of nineteenth-century India's most important relgious figures. In his visions he experienced the identity of various schools of Hinduism as well as Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity. "God is infinite, and the paths to God are infinite."  45-minute video, interesting post.

Summary of a new bipartisan bill for energy permitting reform. (TwitterX)

Developing a Christian AI, because the existing AIs can't get Christianity right. (Twitter/X, via Scott Siskind's monthly links post) Presumably AI gets Christianity wrong because it is learning from self-proclaimed Christians on the internet who also get all the theology wrong.

De-transitioner Fox Varian wins $2 million verdict against the psychologist and surgeon who, she says, encouraged her to have a double mastectomy at 16. This whole case is about mental health, both then and now. People should be more careful about encouraging clearly messed-up young people to make major decisions. (NY Post, NY Times)

The "unknown language" created by medieval mystic/abbess/composer Hildegard of Bingen: 25-minute video, short article, long article. And a recording of the only surviving work she composed in this language, 4 minutes.

Conserving a gilded copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, 17-minute video.

Music of the medieval troubadors, based on some of the oldest surviving scores for secular music, hour-long performance but if you like you can listen to just the first few minutes and get the flavor. Much more droning and Arab-sounding than you probably imagine.

Three people whose first encounters with America may have had profound consequences: Sayyid Qutb, Wang Huning, Boris Yeltsin.

Lawsuit filed against Cornell for raced-based hiring of professors (Twitter/X; Cornell Sun; The Hill). I've been waiting for this, given how blatantly some universities have favored minority hires over the past two decades; I gather that the main problem has been finding potential plaintiffs with a plausible claim to having been harmed. And this suit may fail for that reason, since the plaintiff never even applied for a job at Cornell. The point may just be to shine a light on Cornell's practices, including their spreadsheet of "favorable" qualities.

Can AIs hire humans? (Twitter/X)

Decline of the "mass market" book. Not that book sales are declining, they are just shifting into genres like Romantasy and thrillers. Another sign that there is now no more "common center"of culture, just various subcultures with their own fans.

White people on Twitter/X openly complaining that Asians are anti-American because they work too hard in school.

Moves against social media are spreading: "Spain will ban social media for under-16s and require platforms to employ strict age verification tools, joining Australia, France and Denmark in moves to curb the influence of digital platforms on children."

Nate Silver, "Don't Discount American Democracy."

According to Wired, "In 2024, the total installed electricity capacity of the planet—every coal, gas, hydro, and nuclear plant and all of the renewables—was about 10 terawatts. The Chinese solar supply chain can now pump out 1 terawatt of panels every year."

Paper arguing that the genes for lactose tolerance arrived in Portugal with Indo-European migrants, in the Bronze Age. Perhaps this was another factor accounting for their genetic success.

Carl Jung on the four pillars of a worthwhile old age: individuation, integrating the shadow, meaning after achievement (doing to being), reconciliation with mortality. (9-minute video) The basic idea is that older people should forget about youthful stuff like "accomplishments" or "recognition", which require networking and fitting in, and focus more intensely on their true selves. I find that on the contrary I grow more social the older I get.

The mass demolition of row houses in Baltimore, 12-minute video.

Gen. David Petraeus is bullish on Ukraine's chances, 28-minute interview.

Ukrainian blogger Andrew Perpetua ponders America: "I've been rewatching the Sopranos and thinking about the show. I feel like Americans watched this show, internalized it, and gradually shifted their belief systems to match it."

Most Penicillin Allergies are Fake

Just learned about this 2020 paper at PubMed:

Many patients report allergies to penicillin, although in over 90% of these the label of penicillin allergy is shown to be incorrect following comprehensive testing. Inappropriate and inaccurate penicillin allergy labelling is a barrier to antimicrobial stewardship and can lead to patient harm. This review assesses an emergent evidence base and trend favouring delabelling using direct oral penicillin challenges following a stratified risk assessment of the likelihood and existence of true penicillin allergy, to identify and make recommendations for key components for implementation in standard practice.  

My Presidential Platform

I can sum up my platform with one noble word from a past era of American politics: normalcy.

After the woke madness and then the MAGA Madness, after January 6 and the George Floyd riots and the ICE assault on America, I promise to get America back to normal. No more video of fighting in our streets. No judicial persecutions, no threats to our electoral system, no trying to get people fired for their views. 

I will promote a legal regime with no special privileges for anyone. If being a regular old American isn't good enough for you, go somewhere else.

My goal will be that unless some foreign crisis pops up, my name will appear in headlines only once a year, for my state of the union address. In those addresses I propose to talk about things like how many miles of highway have been repaved, how many acres of solar arrays have been installed, how many houses have been built. Otherwise I will devote my time to things too boring for most people to notice, like NEPA reform, improving the power grid, fixing our naval shipbuilding mess, and reducing corruption in Medicare and Medicaid.

I promise to pass a budget every year, on time. I promise to get the budget deficit headed downward.

I promise to appoint judges devoted to defending the constitution.

I promise to stay off social media and instruct my administration to do likewise. We will post only to make Americans aware of important developments, like changes in Medicare rules.

I promise that every activist in the country, of whatever stripe, will complain that my administration is not doing enough. 

Thank you for your attention.

Immigrants and the US Budget:

Study from the Cato Institute:

The government first began gathering detailed information on benefits use by citizenship status in 1994. The data show:

1. For each year from 1994 to 2023, the US immigrant population generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government.
2. Over that period, immigrants created a cumulative fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion in real 2024 US dollars, including $3.9 trillion in savings on interest on the debt.
3. Without immigrants, US government public debt at all levels would be at least 205 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—nearly twice its 2023 level.

These results, which do not account for any of immigration’s indirect, tax-revenue-boosting effects on economic growth, represent the lower bound of the positive fiscal effects. Even by this conservative analysis, immigrants may have already prevented a fiscal crisis. 

Epstein and the Blood Libel

Matthew Schmitz at First Things:

The Epstein myth updates these lies for the age of Jewish statehood. It presents Epstein as blackmailing American leaders—not on behalf of a shadowy world Jewry, but on behalf of the Jewish state. And it recasts Jewish ritual sacrifice in terms of child sexual abuse. The anti-Semitic implications of the Epstein myth may not be widely acknowledged, but they are understood by many of the myth’s most important promoters.

Take Maria Farmer, an Epstein accuser who has been interviewed by MSNBC and respectfully profiled by the New York Times. She remarked in a recent interview, “All the Jewish people I met just happen to be pedophiles who run the world economy.” She is an adherent of David Icke, the UFOlogist who has promoted the Protocols [of the Elders of Zion] and suggested that the world is controlled by shape-shifting alien “­reptilians” that merely appear to be human, including the members of the Rothschild family.

Similar claims are made by another Epstein accuser, Juliette ­Bryant. Maurene Comey, the prosecutor of Ghislaine Maxwell, submitted a victim impact statement from Bryant at Maxwell’s ­sentencing hearing. Apparently, the government regards Bryant’s words on Epstein as credible. This is a remarkable judgment. Earlier this year, Bryant declared on social media that she had “witnessed Epstein turn into an alien reptilian creature.”

Certain facts about Epstein are well established and incontestable: He committed sexual crimes against minors. He deserved to be punished, and more severely than he was. What goes beyond the facts is the Epstein myth. This myth is a synthesis of conspiracy ­theories: satanic panic, blood libel, the ­Protocols, UFOs. It generally presents its assertions in a respectable guise, but as its most enthusiastic adherents reveal, it tends toward the demonization of Jews. 

I would say that the constellation of accusations floating around Epstein island lends itself to the demonization of all sorts of things, which makes it irresistible to many malcontents. For example, various female reporters seem interested because the story demonizes male sexuality. Populists see the global elite partying together on a secret island, the perfect metaphor for their view of the political world. Anti-semites see secret Jewish influence. Socialists see billionaires flaunting their immunity from the law. Nervous Christians see Satanic power; nervous crazy people see reptilian aliens.

Epstein was a sleazeball, a convicted sex offender who got rich helping billionaires avoid taxes. As the list of visitors to his island shows, there are a lot of sleazy men in the world, including two American presidents and a British prince.

But it turns my stomach when media outlets that ought to know better print allegations from Epstein "survivors", even when these women have had to recant their charges under oath. These professional accusers, all of whom were adults when they went to the island, got paid to party with rich men. Nobody forced them to sign up as island escorts. Now they play the victim for cash and attention. Maybe somebody was coerced into going to the island; maybe some of them were effectively raped once they got there. I have seen no evidence of this, but let's allow it is possible. The women in the news as accusers were not coerced and were not raped. They are just displaying the same kind of unstable mania for attention they showed when they went to the island in the first place. Reporters who quote them are indulging in outrage for its own sake.

Given all the important things that are happening in the world, can we please talk about something else?

La Mothe de Pineuilh

Hunting horn from Pineuilh, circa 1000 AD

In 975 AD, a French noble family began constructing a new home in the hills east of Bordeaux. They chose a site along a marshy tributary of the Monsabeau River. Digging a circular ditch about 30 meters (100 feet) across, they piled the mud on the interior to form a platform. There they lived for about 150 years. That a wealthy family chose to live on a little island in this marshy spot tells you all you need to know about the security situation at the time. This was close to the nadir of public order and government power in medieval France.

Ceramics from the site

A charter of 1077 records that some land in this vicinity was donated to the Abbey of Conques by a man called Falco de Barta, which may give us the name of this family.

Aerial view of the excavation

In 2002, the French government began building a new road through the valley. This road, as it happens, ran smack across the site, ultimately destroying the eastern third of the mound.

But before that happened, French archaeologists took a close look at this wonderful site. They discovered that around 1043 (these are all tree ring dates) the ditch was deepened and the height of the mound was greatly increased, forming a "motte" like those you may know from Norman England's motte and bailey castles. This had the effect of burying and thus preserving the earlier occupation of the site. A plan of the early phase is shown above. Notice the three bridges that cross the river to the mound, only one of which would have stood at any given time. The marshy ground around those bridges was full of artifacts, inlcuding objects of wood, horn, and leather preserved by the wet environment.

Detail of the mound area. Notice that there were only two buildings in this section of the mound: an outbuilding at the end of the bridge, possibly a guardhouse or stable, and a large timber hall. This noble French family lived mostly in one great wooden hall like Vikings would have.

Wooden bowl

Much less evidence survived of the later buildings, since they were built on top of the mound, which has eroded considerably since the site was abandoned. But the mound preserved the early period wonderfully, and the marshy ground preserved these wonderful artifacts.

One technical detail the archaeologists were able to work out was that the residents kept reusing wooden beams as they tore down some buildings and built new ones, so that any given structure of the later period might include beams from 975 was well as others that had been freshly cut.

Shoe

Chess pieces

Makes me wish I could teach early medieval history again, so I could share this with my students.