Awesome digital recreation of Tenochtitlan before the Spanish conquest. The most baffling change to me is still the disappearance of Lake Texcoco, which was mostly achieved before 1800.
Spectacular hoard of early medieval gold found in Norway.
Lithium Americas reports that the Lithium deposits in the McDermitt Caldera, on the Oregon-Nevada border, are much larger and richer than previously thought and may be the largest in the world. GM recently invested $650 million in Lithium Americas to insure preferential access to this supply. (The Verge, Yahoo, technical paper)
There's No Such Thing as a Tree: "treeness" has evolved many, many times from plants of diverse kinds.
Kevin Drum on why he opposes cash reparations for black Americans.
Ted Gioia on pop music getting sadder. Another facet of the weirdly depressed mood in America.
Bayard Rustin's very interesting 1965 essay, "From Protest to Politics," projecting a new future for the Civil Rights movement, from which this: "There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement which would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that the absence of power also corrupts."
When the statue of Soviety secret policeman Felix Dzerzhinsky outside KGB headquarters in Moscow was taken down in 1991, it seemed like a sign of a free future. It was just replaced.
At the NY Times, Thomas Edsall argues that one reason for the ongoing troubles of second-tier cities (St. Louis, Baltimore, Cleveland) is the collapse of local business elites, hollowed out by the concentration of banks and corporate headquarters in the biggest metro areas. I have read similar complaints about France, where many regional firms have been consolidated into big companies run from Paris.
Interesting article at Reason on "pirate preservationists," the people who (often illegally) keep their own copies of music or video the makers wish to withdraw or destroy. Even stuff like early Dr. Who episodes and the CBS radio broadcast from Normandy on D-Day only survive in illegal copies.
Bronze canon found in the sea off Sweden yielded a radiocarbon date of 635 +/- 40, which works out to 1285 to 1399 AD, midpoint around 1345, making it the oldest European shipboard canon. The scientists who studied it say it was cast all wrong, which they say means nobody really knew how to cast canons yet.
Via Tyler Cowen, a claim that 80% of the AI lovers created so far have been made by women. The author compares creating AI boyfriends to fan fiction, which is also female dominated.
Video of UFOs that were shown in hearings held by the Mexican Congress: X, X, Youtube. Note that they do not originate with the government, but with outside witnesses. If you think that is really an alien body, please seek professional psychiatric help.
Artifacts found on the "Pilgrimage Road" from Egypt to Mecca appear to have been used by professional sorcerers around 400 years ago.
Australia declares war on cats, again (NY Times, ABC)
NY Times feature on the smugglers who help people through the Darien Gap, the only land route from South America to el Norte. The flow of people hasn't been stopped because local officials are getting a cut of the profits, which amounts to millions of dollars. On the one hand, this is destabilizing our politics, but on the other, people are so desperate to get to the US that this fuels an industry big enough to corrupt governments in Colombia and Panama. How bad can it be here?
Two impressive gold torcs found in Spain.
This week's random past post is Kowloon Walled City.
Bonkers London Times obituary of Major Iain Grahame, British colonial eccentric of the old school.
Ukraine Links
Two minute video on X showing the burned landscape around Klishchiivka.
Ukraine retakes the Bokyo natural gas platforms off Crimea. Video on X, and at YouTube. Russia's Black Sea Fleet has been effectively neutralized for anything but launching long-range missiles.
On the night of September 13 to 14, Ukraine carried out an attack at Yevpatioria in Crimea; several explosions were videotaped by locals. Ukraine claims that the target was an S-400 SAM system, and that the attack was achieved by first using drones to knock out the battery's radars and then Ukrainian Neptune missiles to hit the launchers; Ukraine claims the equipment destroyed was worth $1.2 billion. (UPravda, X, Kyiv Independent) Military experts see a concerted plan to strip Crimea of air defenses so that its network of bases and logistics hubs can be eviscerated by drones and missiles.
Article arguing that Ukraine is waging a "deep battle" with attacks on rear areas designed to hamper Russian logistics and break their morale, and that this may lead to success at the front.
Video posted by a Russian reserve squad stationed near Bakhmut reveals that none of them are in standard Russian uniforms and that they are equipped with a hodgepodge of weapons and gear, some fifty years old.
Thread on X about a new Russian EW system used to jam drones.
On the one hand, this is destabilizing our politics, but on the other, people are so desperate to get to the US that this fuels an industry big enough to corrupt governments in Colombia and Panama. How bad can it be here?
ReplyDelete"How bad can unseasoned raw potatoes be, if all these starving people are rushing to eat them?"
I'm not going to argue about the quality of life in America either way, but I am compelled to note that your reasoning is fallacious - just because something is better than a truly awful alternative doesn't automatically make it "good".
Not just better than Venezuela, which is indeed a very low standard, but also better than Mexico, Brazil, etc.
ReplyDelete@John
ReplyDeleteDo you not realize that Brazil, etc, are all substantially poorer countries than Venezuela?
Venezuela is the richest country in the region - you have to go all the way down to Chile or Argentina, or all the way up to the United States, to find equal or better wealth levels.
There are only a handful of countries in the entire world outside Northern North America and Europe that rank as high or higher than Venezuela, according to the World Bank Classification - Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, the UAE, New Zealand, Australia, and Puerto Rico.
Venezuela's problems are mostly socio-political, rather than economic. People are fleeing it because the government is insane and abusive, and life there is difficult and dangerous because of it, despite the relatively decent wealth level of the country.
But that decent wealth level is what Venezuelans are accustomed to, and so they're reluctant to relocate to poorer countries, even if they are more stable politically. What good is leaving behind one kind of debilitating national problem only to exchange it for another equally debilitating one elsewhere? People don't go to all the trouble of fleeing their home country just to settle for essentially the same outcome somewhere else - they instead seek an improvement in their conditions.
And so rather than going to Mexico, Brazil, etc, they decide that because they're already uprooting their entire lives, they may as well go a bit further and go all the way to America, where their overall prospects can actually improve, rather than remain much the same.
Really?
ReplyDeletehttps://www.statista.com/statistics/371876/gross-domestic-product-gdp-per-capita-in-venezuela/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/263774/gross-domestic-product-gdp-per-capita-in-brazil/
2023
Venezuela 3459
Brasil 9673
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_South_American_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
CIA List 2017
Venezuela 12,400
Brasil 15 500
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/profile/BRA
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/profile/VEN
PPP per capita 2023
Venezuela: 8,03k
Brasil: 18,69k
For world bank I've found data only for 2014 and 2011