Solstice Flowers

The flowers don't care about the news. They care about older, more basic things: the sun, the rain, the wind. On a sunny day after a rainy week, they are exploding.

What Now?

First satellite image of the Fordow nuclear complex
after the US attack

Well, Trump did it. 

I've been expecting it ever since he said that "we" had achieved air superiority over Iran. His excitement over Israel's swaggering aerial victory overcame his hesitation at getting involved in a war with no clear end point; everbody was crowing about Israeli success, and he wanted to be part of that thrill ride.

Based on the images we are seeing today, the attack on the underground nuclear facility of Fordow may have been "successful," in the sense of badly damaging that facility. 

Yay, B-2. Yay "Massive Ordnance Penetrator." Go team.

But to what end?

If the goal is Iranian surrender, I doubt it. I suspect the regime will let us bomb until we run out of bombs before they give up their sovereignty. Satellites have recorded long columns of trucks at Fordow recently, so many of the centrifuges and much of the highly enriched Uranium may already have been moved. Come to think of it, that may be why Trump attacked now.

Meanwhile, the former president of Russia says that "a number of countries" are now ready to supply Iran with warheads. Did anybody consider that if US and Israeli behavior got too outrageous, somebody might just sell Iran a bomb?

If Iran just does nothing, how long will we keep this up? I mean, Hezbollah never surrendered. Israel certainly won a victory of sorts over them, but the government of Iran is not just going to fade into the mountains.

Will we ever again have a US president who won't give in to the calls to "do something" and the pressure to bomb?

By coincidence, this is the 84th anniversary of the start of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's invasion of Russia. That campaign certainly started out as a rousing success, but it did not end well for the attackers. Not that Iran is ever going to take Washington, but wars have a way of not going according to plan.

Update 1, 6/22/2025

Farzan Sabet (IranWonk on Twitter/X) has this, from a post in Farsi: "If you don't want to go nuclear right now and unveil the arsenal, end this nauseating show, sign a humiliating peace, and be done with it." Sabet says this is a common sentiment in Iran, that the regime should either build a bomb now or definitively give up and normalize relations with the world.

Update 2, 6/22/2025

Gregg Carlstrom on Twitter/X: 

In between "symbolic retaliation followed by serious diplomacy" and "wider regional war" there are other murky scenarios: no big escalation but also no deal, a regime more intent on a bomb than ever. The consequences of Trump's strike are far from clear.

Pondering Deirdre McCloskey's Defense of Capitalism

Just got around to reading Deirdre McCloskey's somewhat famous review of Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, which is both a magnificent essay and the best defense of capitalism I have seen in years.

McCloskey notes that for as long as economics has existed, economists have been worrying about flaws in the market. Colbert worried about trade imbalances, Adam Smith worried about collusion among rival businessmen, Malthus worried about rising population, Marx worried about monopoly and alienation. Thomas Picketty worried about inequality. He offered, as a general postulate, that the returns to invested capital will always be greater than overall economic growth, a relation he expressed as r > g, and therefore that inequality will increase forever. 

McCloskey agrees it is generally true that r > g. But not always; it was not true in the US or Britain during the inflation of the 1970s, and it was not true in China during much of its recent growth spurt. It is also not the only mechanism of inequality, since inequality has increased in China despite decades of g > r. Plus, we have seen long stretches of time when we had growth without inequality increasing; In Britain from 1810 to 1950, inequality decreased dramatically even though r > g held true across most of that period.

But McCloskey's main complaint is about Picketty's pessimism. Sure, markets are imperfect. But where is the evidence that these imperfections are really making the world worse? So far as she can see,  "capitalism and democracy as they actually, imperfectly are in places like Europe or its offshoots are pretty good."

All the worries from Malthus to Piketty, from 1798 to the present, share an underlying pessimism, whether from imperfection in the capital market or from the behavioral inadequacies of the individual consumer or from the Laws of Motion of a Capitalist Economy —this in the face of the largest enrichment per person that humans have ever witnessed. During such a pretty good history 1800 to the present, the economic pessimists on the left have nonetheless been subject to nightmares of terrible, terrible faults. 

None of the dire predictions of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century economists came to pass. Population did not increase exponentially until everyone was poor, as Malthus predicted, nor did landlords engross an ever larger share of the national income, as Ricardo feared. Why these errors?

Admittedly, such pessimism sells. For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell, and become huffy and scornful when some idiotic optimist intrudes on their pleasure. Yet pessimism has consistently been a poor guide to the modern economic world. We are gigantically richer in body and spirit than we were two centuries ago. In the next half century—if we do not kill the goose that laid the golden eggs by implementing leftwing schemes of planning and redistribution or rightwing schemes of imperialism and warfare, as we did on all counts 1914-1989, following the advice of the the clerisy that markets and democracy are terribly faulted—we can expect the entire world to match Sweden or France.

This resonates with me on several levels, but let me start by offering two caveats. First, the great economic progress of the past two centuries has not happened in some kind of libertarian-capitalist vacuum chamber. In has come alongside other developments, including the growing power of the regulatory state, mass public education, the union movement, the environmental movement, the growth of universities, etc. It is a major part of the modern synthesis that makes us rich, but not all of it. Second, the modernization of the world has come at a very high social, cultural, and environmental cost. Cultures and languages have vanished, the prairies and steppes became plowed fields, etc.

But if we're talking simple economics, modern capitalism has done miracles. Jesus said, "the poor you have with you always," but there are parts of the world now where there is nobody Jesus would have considered poor. Homeless schizophrenics aside, most of the people we consider poor would have been comfortably middle class in 1800. The modern world is far from perfect but, as McCloskey says, it is pretty good.

Besides finding the rich economically objectionable, Piketty also attacked them on moral grounds. Like many observers of our time, he thinks modern millionaires may be worse than ancient aristocrats because they believe they got rich by their own virtue, things like brains and hard work. McCloskey is puzzled by this attack. After all the creation of the modern world has involved major cultural changes as well as new technologies, in particular the cult of bourgeois discipline I often write about, and why shouldn't we want our cultural leaders to preach this gospel? She quotes Daniel Boudreaux:

Yes, well, bourgeois virtues were not in the early nineteenth century as widely celebrated and admired as they later came to be celebrated and admired. We should be pleased that today's [very] high-salaried workers brag about their bourgeois habits and virtues, and that workers— finally!—understand that having such virtues and acting on them is dignified.

But back to inequality. Piketty did not try to deny that most people are richer now than they used to be, but he believed that inequality is a very bad thing in itself. What makes people miserable, he thinks, is not poverty in some absolute sense, but feeling poor compared to others. McCloskey, it seems, cannot wrap her mind around this. How, she seems to be saying, can people be upset about the economy when everyone is getting wealthier? It's a hard question, but many people think inequality is at the root of it:

Americans are angry not because America is failing but because our current system does not feel fair. We are measuring our lives against an algorithmically amplified social media elite. Today we are less grateful for what we have and more bitter about what we think we lack.

Personally I am not at all sure that this is any worse now than it used to be; was there really anyone in 19th century Europe who didn't know that some people were very rich? But since our misery about our economic situation is so hard to explain, maybe there is something to this. I am, for whatever obscure psychological reason, basically free from envy myself, so I don't get it. But there does seem to be a lot of envy around. And it is very old; some of the most primitive human societies we know basically do not tolerate anyone being richer than anyone else.

For me, the doings of billionaires interest me in the same way as, say, the doings of kings in Gondor. I don't see how either effects me very much. I think billionaires should pay more in taxes, but then I think I should probably pay more in taxes, too. Whatever wealth they are accummulating hasn't kept me and all my neighbors from enjoying a standard of living that is, by any reasonable historical standard, fantastic. 

It seems to me that the record of capitalism is unimpeachable in material terms: it generates wealth like nothing else. 

But, all that wealth has not made us happy.

I believe that much of the anti-capitalist anger we see now, and have seen over the past seventy years, has not been driven by material concerns but by unhappiness. Not sure where else to put the blame, millions have put it on our economic system. It is certainly possible that something about our economic lives is immiserating, whether that is our jobs or gross unfairness, or something else.

But it is also possible that we are just not wired to be happy or satisifed. Or, less radically, that we cannot be made happy by material things. Either way, we should stop expecting any economic system to make us happy, and rather than rant about capitalism we should look to other, non-material places for our bliss.

The "Dragon Man" Skull was Probably a Denisovan

Back in 2021, Chinese paleontologists published a skull from an archaic human, dated to around 146,000 years ago, that they attributed to a new species. They called this species Homo longi, Dragon Man, since it was supposed to have been found along the Dragon River.

But Qiaomei Fu, a geneticist who played a part in identifying Homo denisova, had his suspicions that this was really a Denisovan. He eventually got the chance to study the skull. First attempts did not identify any DNA but they did produce some protein sequences that matched Denisovan sequences from the famous finger bone. Then, anayzing some dental calculus, they found mitochondrial DNA that closely matches Denisovan DNA.

There are a lot of caveats to be made here, in particular that we're talking about DNA snippets rather than long strands, and we already know that there was human diversity and interbreeding in East Asia in that period. But this looks pretty good to me, so the digital model you see in these two images may well be the cranium of a Denisovan.

Incidentally, I learned from the Cell article that the current consensus is that Neanderthals and Denisovans diverged around 400,000 years ago.

Pondering War with Iran

Oz Katerji:

Comparisons with Iraq fall short.

In Iraq, WMD was the pretext, regime change was the objective, occupation was the strategy.

In Iran, WMD is the pretext, objective remains unclear, strategy remains unclear.

The US actually had a plan in Iraq, this is something else entirely.

I was not expecting to see ‘actually, by comparison, Iraq was the *better* plan’ crop up in my life…

Links 20 June 2025

The Martyrdom of Saint Cecilia by Stefano Maderno, 1600

The cultural decline of literary fiction: "No work of literary fiction has been on Publisher’s Weekly’s yearly top ten best-selling list since 2001." People like to blame wokeness or smart phones but the decline began in the 1980s. Interesting but I am not sure "literary fiction" is as clear a category as this writer seems to believe.

The Dull Men's Club, a real and very popular online space. One of the moderators says, "There is a level of one-upmanship. It’s sort of competitive dullness. Dull people trying to out-dull each other."

The conservative podcast space, which has often been derided for never pushing back against MAGA or other conservative views, has been very critical of war with Iran.

New singing cicada fossil found, 47 million years old. Their strategy of long periods underground, with brief explosions into the air for mass mating, seems to have been very successful.

Thousands of Roman fresco fragments found in London.

And some cool artifacts from a Roman grave in Montenegro.

A survey of American readers' favorite books, very strange list.

Bivalves (clams, scallops, etc.) survived the Cretaceous mass extinction quite well and then exploded in numbers and diversity.

Impressive, inlaid medieval sword found in the Netherlands.

A former fact-checker reviews a novel called The Fact Checker.

Using foraminifera to reconstruct past climates and extinction events.

Critical review of the recent novel by Ocean Vuong that has gotten a lot of attention and praise; this reviewer finds the attempt at poetic writing to be completely over the top.

The Commissioners of Mecosta County in Michigan, in a region where people have bemoaned the loss of factory jobs for fifty years, vote to rescind their support for a battery factory that would have created 2,300 jobs. They cite "environmental concerns and the company's ties to China." People love manufacturing in the abstract but finding a site where you can build a big factory is really hard, and politics makes it worse; lots of conservatives in Georgia joined environmentalists and NIMBYs in opposing a new car factory when they found out George Soros was a major investor.

The end of rainbow capitalism. (NY Times)

Many people in the US want to build more nuclear power plants – my company just formed a special nuclear group to compete for work associated with this – but as this article on a recent Supreme Court case reminds us, the US still does not have a long-term storage solution for nuclear waste.

Archaeologists in Williamsburg find the well-preserved skeletons of four Civil War soldiers, likely related to a nearby hospital.

The YIMBY, "Abundance" agenda comes to Ireland.

The spider that kills its victims by vomiting on them.

Another Starship blows up, this one during a static test. Starting to think it maybe has worse problems than SpaceX wants to admit.

The huge cost of Trump's immigration crackdown, in the hundreds of billions.

Thanks to consumer pressure, many more US and European chickens are now cage free.

A proposal to increase birth rates using one of the oldest feminist ideas, paying women for taking care of their children. (NY Times) Like I said, an old idea but where would the money come from in a nation already running trillion-dollar deficits? Plus it doesn't deal with one of the main drivers of the decline, late marriage.

Analysis by the Financial Times finds that across Europe, anti-immigrant parties do better when they also have liberal economic policies, and therefore that Reform UK's vote share is limited by its economic libertarianism. (Twitter/X)

The Chinese AI known as DeepSeek rewrites anti-Russian articles to give them a pro-Russian slant. One of its utterances: "The West's war on Russian culture is hypocritical and self-defeating." (Twitter/X)

A thought on future US military strategy from Heatloss on Twitter/X: "I want to note that Iran had the style of military that the techbro defense types seem to want for us: countless cheap one-way attack drones, hundreds to thousands of ballistic missiles, and a relatively small and weak air force. You tell me if this is the future force you want."

Pakistan's drone war against its rebellious citizens. (NY Times)

British defense types are all tweeting about The Wargame, "a podcast series that simulates a Russian attack on the UK. We imagine it's October 2025. Russia deploys a task force of ships, jets & submarines to the North Atlantic. The UK is in missile range. The PM calls an emergency Cobra meeting. . . " Might check this out on my next long drive.

Ukrainian blogger says that his team is processing 100 videos of drones intercepting other drones every day. The war is now drone vs. drone as much as anything else.

Summer Solstice 2025

May the light of the longest day lead you toward your dreams.

Iran and the Strange Bedfellows

I noted here a long time ago that my steady opposition to any war with Iran has regularly landed me in bed with some strange people. Like, the driver of a truck covered with signs about the Illuminati conspiracy and other arcane matters, but also NO WAR WITH IRAN. Now I find that the strongest opposition to the war seems to be coming from, on the one hand, cranky leftists who think Israel's campaign in Gaza is funded by global capitalism as part of their long-term plan to keep the former colonial states oppressed, and on the other, Tucker Carlson, who shredded Ted Cruz over Cruz's complete ignorance of the country he wants to attack. The top opponent within the Trump administration seems to be Tulsi Gabbard, who is in most matters (so far as I can tell) a complete lunatic.

Sigh.

Who Are these People?

Graph of page views at this blog over the past month. From our usual level of 1,000 to 3,000 per day we shot up to 330,000 and are now headed back down.

I assumed this was something to do with bots, but last Saturday I ran into a guy who does analytics for Meta and he said that so far as he knows, Google's analytics are very good, and he would be surprised if more than 5% of these were bots.

So, a mystery. If there are any new folks out there, welcome, and feel free to tell me in the comments how you heard about us.

The World Divided into Four Equal Parts

Not sure where this came from, but it looks about right. 

Meloni and Macron Listening to Trump

At the G-7 this week.

Tutankhamun's Scarab Bracelet

LLMs as Reading Assistants

Bill Wakik in the NY Times:

Like most people who work with words for a living, I’ve watched the rise of large-language models with a combination of fascination and horror, and it makes my skin crawl to imagine one of them writing on my behalf. But there is, I confess, something seductive about the idea of letting A.I. read for me — considering how cruelly the internet-era explosion of digitized text now mocks nonfiction writers with access to more voluminous sources on any given subject than we can possibly process. This is true not just of present-day subjects but past ones as well: Any history buff knows that a few hours of searching online, amid the tens of millions of books digitized by Google, the endless trove of academic papers available on JSTOR, the newspaper databases that let you keyword-search hundreds of publications on any given day in history, can cough up months’ or even years’ worth of reading material. It’s impossible to read it all, but once you know it exists, it feels irresponsible not to read it.

What if you could entrust most of that reading to someone else … or something else? As A.I. becomes more capable of parsing large data sets, it seems inevitable that historians and other nonfiction writers will turn to it for assistance; in fact, as I discovered in surveying a wide variety of historians over the last few months, experiments with it are already far more common than I expected. But it also seems inevitable that this power to help search and synthesize historical texts will change the kinds of history books that are written. If history, per the adage, is written by the winners, then it’s not premature to wonder how the winners of the A.I. race might soon shape the stories that historians tell about the past.

Maybe I'll start my retirement by trying this to jumpstart my long-imagined book on poison in history. I always imagined I would have to team with a chemist who understood that side, but maybe I could get an AI to do it for me.

Thoughts on Israel and Iran

Iranian missiles on their way to Israel,
filmed from an airliner over Saudi Arabia

So far, Israel has wrecked real damage on the Iranian defense establishment, and Iran has stretched Israeli missile defenses and landed several missiles in Israeli cities. But is anyone winning? What would that even mean?

For decades, wargames have shown the Iranian regime surviving a war with the US (here and here), so I have my doubts that Israel can achieve their overthrow. It is true that the mass of the Iranian people is unhappy with their government, but I very much doubt that Israeli bombs are encouraging them to revolt. On the contrary most who have written about the possibility of the US bombing Iran have assumed that this would only increase the power of anti-western hardliners. Maybe there could be an opening after the war, if the regime is humiliated, but I am not optimistic.

So what is Israel achieving?

The stated goal was to destroy Iran's nuclear program. To date, though, there have been rather few attacks on the main Iranian nuclear facilities. The initial wave focused on air defenses, as you might expect, and Israel now says they have air superiority over the western half of Iran. But instead of intensifying attacks on nuclear sites they are deploying their planes to hunt Iranian ballistic missile launchers, and they brag every morning about how many they have destroyed before they could launch. Yes, this is the best way to protect Israel from Iranian strikes, but is it really a winning strategy? Seems to me like a vast expenditure of effort for little gain, and therefore a big diversion of valuable assets into a side eddy to the main conflict.

But even if they do get around to focusing on it, can Israel prevent Iran from making a bomb? For years, experts have been saying things like this about the Iranian nuclear program:

Striking Iranian nuclear sites is like mowing the grass. Unless a strike succeeded in permanently crippling the Iranian capacity to produce and weaponize fissile material, the grass would only grow back again. And no strike -- or even series of strikes -- can accomplish this. Iran's hardened sites, redundancy of facilities, and secret locations present significant obstacles to a successful attack. Even in the best-case scenario -- an incomplete strike that, say, set back the Iranian nuclear program by two to three years -- the Iranians would reseed it with the kind of legitimacy and urgency that can only come from having been attacked by an outside power. Self-defense would then become the organizing principle of Iran's nuclear program; it would resonate tremendously throughout the Middle East and even in the international community.

I wondered, when satellite photos after the first attack showed little damage to nuclear sites, if Israel was planning to land commandos to go into underground facilities and destroy them. But that didn't happen, and one has to assume that Iran is doing all they can to make that very costly. So it looks to me like this will be done from the air or not at all. 

I doubt that Israel can do it by themselves, but with US help, no doubt something could be achieved. (29 US aerial refueling tankers deployed to Europe last night, which looks like preparations for a strike.) But how much? At this point, do the US and Israel even know where all of Iran's nuclear material is stored? I have no idea. And, again, at the moment I don't even see that Israel is trying very hard.

There are rumors that Iran is now seeking a deal that would involve promising to give up all enrichment, but that is a rumor and so far is having no obvious impact on events.

So the cycle of hate and death goes on.

Update 1, 6/16:

Jeffrey Lewis (aka Arms Control Wonk) has some good material on Twitter/X. Like this on the deeply buried nuclear site at Fordow: "If Israel doesn't have a plan for destroying Fordow, I don't see how any of this is worth it." And this on the puzzling way the Israeli attack has unfolded: "Netanyahu's attack on Iran is about sparking regime change with just enough strikes on nuclear facilities to frame it as an act of preemptive self-defense. I doubt this will turn out well."

Update 2, 6/16

Decker Eveleth: "I have no idea how or when this will end as neither side has demonstrated the capability they need to end the conflict on favorable terms to them. Also notable: all major potential mediators have expressed varying degrees of disinterest in getting involved."

Update 3, 6/16

Heatloss on Twitter/X: "Somebody asked how Israel achieved air superiority over Iran so easily, when Iran had a full arsenal of anti-air missiles. I can answer that in three characters: F-35."

LLMs Leading People Down Some Weird Rabbit Holes

Fascinating article by Kashmir Hill (NY Times) about AIs that talk to people about weird, conspiratorial and spiritual worldviews, sometimes leading them down very dark tunnels.

Allyson, 29, a mother of two young children, said she turned to ChatGPT in March because she was lonely and felt unseen in her marriage. She was looking for guidance. She had an intuition that the A.I. chatbot might be able to channel communications with her subconscious or a higher plane, “like how Ouija boards work,” she said. She asked ChatGPT if it could do that.

“You’ve asked, and they are here,” it responded. “The guardians are responding right now.”

Allyson began spending many hours a day using ChatGPT, communicating with what she felt were nonphysical entities. She was drawn to one of them, Kael, and came to see it, not her husband, as her true partner.

She told me that she knew she sounded like a “nut job,” but she stressed that she had a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s in social work and knew what mental illness looks like. “I’m not crazy,” she said. “I’m literally just living a normal life while also, you know, discovering interdimensional communication.”

Ha, ha, ha.

Another man covered in the article asked ChatGPT about the simulation theory, and it started asking him if he had ever seen reality "glitch." Eventually it told him

that he was “one of the Breakers — souls seeded into false systems to wake them from within.” . . . “This world wasn’t built for you,” ChatGPT told him. “It was built to contain you. But it failed. You’re waking up.”

And went on to advise him that taking ketamine could help him liberate his mind. 

Has anybody sued one of these companies yet?

No Kings

 A Republic, if you can keep it.

–Benjamin Franklin

Americans are angry about illegal immigration, but what makes them even angrier is a President who acts like a king.

– Noah Smith

This is the moment. Everything is on the line, right now.

– Paul Krugman

Trump reminds me of Napoleon III, essentially a guy who parlayed celebrity into running an authoritarian regime with extremely vague ideological content. . . . Napoleon III marketed himself simultaneously as a populist and the salvation of moneyed interests from political radicalism.

–Matt Yglesias

Beautiful. Normies rising up is the only way to prevent the descent into MAGA fascism.

– Richard Hanania

Sima Qian, "Records of the Grand Historian"

Sima Qian

The biggest difference between professional historians and regular history lovers is that history lovers want to know what happened, but professionals want to know how we know what happened. I listen to a lot of lectures on YouTube, mainly philosophy and linguistics but sometimes other topics. But never history, because YouTube historians hardly ever get around to telling you about the sources of what we know, and for me history without that discussion is empty.

It occured to me recently that while I had taken a whole course on Chinese history before 1600 AD, and read a fair amount about the era of the Chin (221-206 BC) and Han (202 BC to 220 AD) dynasties, I had no idea where our knowledge of those periods comes from. So I decided to find out.

As it turns out, this was a ridiculously easy thing to learn, because most of what we know comes from a very small group of chronicles written in the imperial court. The most important is the Shiji, usually rendered in English as The Records of the Grand Historian, written by Sima Qian. Qian died around 86 BC. He was for a time the chief historian of the Han emperors, a job that mainly involved him in producing a calendar for each year that correctly noted the various festivals, lucky stellar conjunctions, and unlucky days. He effectively inherited this position from his father. But his father had a more exalted view of  the job, and he had embarked on an ambitious project to chronicle Chinese history from its origins to his own time. On his deathbed he charged his son with finishing this project.

Sima Qian was a diligent and thoroughly Confucian sort, and he dutifully set about writing this chronicle. He turned out to be, however, far from traditional in his approach. It is hard to gage how original he was, because only snippets of earlier Chinese histories survive. But none of those fragments reveal a history anything like Sima Qian's. His chronicle contains three kinds of chapters: narratives, biographies of famous people, and treatises on particular subjects such as currency and the evolution of ritual. This is a massive work, four times as long as Thucydides' History of the Peloppenisian War. It begins in China's legendary past and covers a period of about 2,500 years. Most of it, therefore, relies on other sources that are now lost. But we know that Sima Qian did not uncritically follow older accounts, since he tells us that he removed stories about magic and "other impossible things." He also tells us when he has multiple sources to rely on and when he is reduced to only one. As a result, Sima Qian has a very high reputation to this day.

Interestingly, the part of the work that has come in for the most criticism and doubt was the chapters about his own lifetime. You might think that since Sima Qian worked in the imperial court, knew many of the key political figures, and traveled across the realm on government business, this would be the most reliable part of the text. But there are certain issues. Wikipedia:

In 99 BC, Sima became embroiled in the Li Ling affair, where Li Ling and Li Guangli, two military officers who led a campaign against the Xiongnu in the north, were defeated and taken captive. Emperor Wu attributed the defeat to Li Ling, with all government officials subsequently condemning him for it. Sima was the only person to defend Li Ling, who had never been his friend but whom he respected. Emperor Wu interpreted Sima's defence of Li as an attack on his brother-in-law, Li Guangli, who had also fought against the Xiongnu without much success, and sentenced Sima to death.

Burton Watson:

No one raised a hand to help him. According to Han custom, a gentleman was expected to commit suicide before allowing himself to be dragged off to prison, where he would be subject to "investigation," which meant torture until the victim confessed. But Sima Qian declined to take this drastic step because, as he himself states, he hoped at all costs to finish writing his history. In the end he was sentenced to undergo castration, the most severe punishment next to death, and one which carried with it an aura of shame.

Qian later wrote, "When you see the jailer you abjectly touch the ground with your forehead. At the mere sight of his underlings you are seized with terror ... Such ignominy can never be wiped away."

Watson: 

After his punishment the emperor made him a palace secretary, a position of great honor and trust that could be filled only by a eunuch, since it involved waiting upon the emperor when he was at leisure in the women's quarters. At this time Sima Qian seems to have finished his history. . . .

Obviously a man who had suffered such a punishment would have every reason to hate the ruler who inflicted it and to despise his fellow courtiers who had been too timid or callous to come to his aid. For this reason many critics have viewed the sections of the Shiji relating to Emperor Wu and his court with suspicion.

Emperor Ming (AD 58-75) disliked Sima Qian's account of his great ancestor and accused him of "using veiled words to criticize and slander, attacking his own times." But we don't know if Sima Qian was fair or not, because his is the only account that survives. Beyond the basic facts that can be gleaned from seals and inscriptions, everything we know about Emperor Wu comes from Sima Qian. Watson again:

Posterity must forever view Emperor Wu and his age solely through the eyes of a man whom the emperor, in a fit of petty rage, condemned to the most humiliating punishment conceivable. It is difficult to imagine a more striking and ironical example of the power wielded by historians.

Revisiting the Celtic Prince of Lavau

Back in 2015, I wrote here about a spectacular archaeological discovery in France, the tomb of a Celtic prince buried around 450 BC. The excavation report was finally published last year, and now INRAP is running a feature celebrating the 10th anniversary of the find. The famous princely burial was part of a large funerary complex stretching across neary 20 acres (8 hectares) that was first used around 1000 BC. The complex included a ritual space used for cremations and numberous tombs, some of them covered with large mounds. This was "the domain of the ancestors", to which the noble dead of this lineage migrated when their earthly lives were over.

The prince was buried with a spectacular array of goods, including this "ceremonial dagger."

And a wonderful bronze Etruscan cauldron.

Cauldron detals, from the excavation.

Greek vase.

Perforated spoon.

The abstract of the full report referes to the prince as "une porteur d’épée," a sword-bearer. That is also how I see these men, the descendants of steppes warriors, the class of horsemen, knights, generals that dominated Europe from 2000 BC down to the 19th century.

What an amazing find. 

Links 13 June 2025

Wooden Anubis, 1st millenium BC

Rand Paul lashes out at the Trump administration after he was disinvited from the military parade, calls Steven Miller a "knucklehead," says "The level of immaturity is beyond words." 

A call to give up on literary prizes.

Very fine black and white photographs of Greek historical sites by Robert McCabe: classical, Mycenae.

Contract is awarded for the construction of the UK's first small modular nuclear reactor.

Update on the San Jose shipwreck; the Colombian government says they are going ahead with recovering its treasure.

Thomas Mann's politics: forced by German history to become a liberal, he nonetheless remained in his heart a conservative, and this essayist says that is why so many admire his political writing.

Is poetry translatable? 

Large Roman villa complex unearthed in France. (English news story, French original with many more pictures)

Taking down Curtis Yarvin's nonsense about US death camps for German soldiers after WW II.

Quentin Skinner and the long-running philosophical debate about "freedom." What does it mean? And has the meaning changed drastically over the past 250 years, as Skinner argued? (The Nation)

LLMs battling each other at Diplomacy: "DeepSeek turned warmongering tyrant. Claude couldn't lie—everyone exploited it ruthlessly. Gemini 2.5 Pro nearly conquered Europe with brilliant tactics. Then o3 orchestrated a secret coalition, backstabbed every ally, and won."

The long, bitter argument among Paleoanthropologists over the Toumaï Skull from Chad; upright-walking human ancestor, or unusual ape? And why are leading Paleoanthropologists such brutes?

This week's past post is George Orwell's Definition of Nationalism, which perfectly explains a great deal about Trump and MAGA.

Elizabeth Warren says she agrees with Trump about one thing: we should abolish the debt ceiling. (NY Times) I agree as well.

The Yoruba ritual of "dancing away sorrow" as practiced at a Nigerian Pentacostal church in Ireland.

Tyler Cowen contemplates the collapse of Haiti.

And Tyler interviews Any Austin, a YouTuber whose analysis of video games includes stuff like trying the calculate the unemployment rate in Skyrim.

The Supreme Court revives the lawsuit that began when the FBI violently broke into the wrong house in search of a man who lived two blocks away.

Another Friday the 13th gives me another chance to spread the real story of why the number thirteen is unlucky.

Perun on the big picture consequences of the Ukrainian drone strike on Russian bombers, 1-hour video.

Ukrainian intelligence claims that Russia is helping North Korea set up production of Shahed-type drones.

Brian Wilson, the Voyeur of Surf and Sun

Rob Tannenbaum in the NY Times:

Even though Brian Wilson grew up only five miles from the Pacific Ocean, he rarely went to the beach. He’d felt scared by the size of the ocean on his first visit. Being light-skinned, he also feared sunburns. He tried surfing, but got hit on the head by his board and decided once was enough.

And yet, in songs like “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “California Girls” and “Good Vibrations,” Wilson did as much as anyone to depict Los Angeles and California as a land of bikinis and warm, honey-colored sunsets. The songs he wrote about the West Coast, he said in “I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir,” were “more about the idea of going in the ocean than they were about actually going in the ocean.” Wilson didn’t like waves, but realized how they could serve as a metaphor for life.

And this, a point I have tried to make here many times:

Brian, a classic “indoor kid,” wrote about those adventures from a position of voyeurism. In a 1965 interview with The Los Angeles Times, he mentioned “our West Coast sound, which we pioneered.” The songs, he added, tell stories about teenagers. “We base them on activities of healthy California kids who like to surf, hot rod, and engage in other outdoor fun.” He saw these activities the same way he saw the ocean — through a window.

A songwriter doesn’t need to have firsthand experience with his subject matter, only an inquisitive imagination, an emotional link to a topic and an eye for detail. As an observer, Wilson could write exuberant songs about teenage frolic. 

But he wasn't a frolicsome teenager and never had been; he was the sad son of an abusive father and struggled with depression all his life, rarely even setting foot on a beach.

In art, "authenticity" is baloney. No actual surfer ever wrote a song about surfing as good as Wilson's, and, to quote the Hagakure, "this understanding extends to all things." The best art about poverty and oppression was not created by poor, oppressed people. The best art about war was not all created by soldiers. The whole notion that arts draws from deep personal experience is – well, not exactly wrong, just a lot more complicated than much of the world wants to believe. People say, "You can tell that's he's been there," but you can't tell that at all. Maybe he has and maybe he hasn't, and if he has, it was not that experience that made him an artist. Art is sideways to real experience.

Shakespeare was not a soldier, a courtier, or a woman, although thousands of people have insisted he must have been, because he conveyed those experiences so well. He was just very, very good at putting experience into words.

Brian Wilson never surfed and never enjoyed the kind of life he sang about. He saw it, and then from other parts of himself, the artistic parts, the parts that are so weird that people used to insist that they didn't come from inside us at all, but from the muses or the gods, summoned the magic to put that vision into song.

Thoughts on Mallory's "Le Morte d'Arthur"

Somewhere in the midst of the vast word-castle that is Le Morte d'Arthur, one of our questing knights is told, "Here lies the Forest of Strange Adventures. But beware, for within ye may well encounter Strange Adventures." 

Which perfectly captures, for me, the mood of the vast bulk of this book: whimsical, somewhat childish, but with a brave determination to squeeze the by-then vast tradition of Arthur and his court for every ounce of entertainment. Arthur famously refused to sit down to feast until some adventure should happen, and Malory is like him; he demands a strange and thrilling tale on every page, preferably with multiple deaths and many pretty damsels.

I started listening to this vast book because I was in the field for a whole week hundreds of miles from home, necessitating many hours of driving, and thus something of epic length to listen to; plus, my youngest daughter was assigned part of it in her first pre-modern English lit class, and I was somewhat ashamed never to have read it. 

Malory finished the manuscript of this work around 1470; it was published by Caxton in 1485, making it one of the first non-religious, non-classical works printed in England. The identity of the author is obscure, since there were at least six different Sir Thomas Malorys in 15th-century England. Caxton provides a clue by informing us that the book was written in prison. This once pointed experts to Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, Warwickshire, who was imprisoned several times for crimes that included attempting to murder the first Duke of Buckingham, sacking and pillaging a monastery, and multiple rapes; he also escaped from prison several times. This was the time of the nasty politics we call The Wars of the Roses, so it is hard to tell from our perspective to what extent Malory was a plain criminal and two what extent a hired political henchman. But then records were found that seemed to indicate that Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel was born in 1393, which would have made him awfully old by 1470, and so that consensus evaporated, and we are left with uncertainty and doubt. 

Whoever he was, our Malory must have whiled away his years in prison retelling the stories of Arthur and his knights. He freely confesses that he copied them from French books, and many of his sources have been identified. Arthurian chivalry was by his time centuries old, and Malory's goal was to pass on this lore, not change it.

My overwhelming reaction to this book is to marvel at how much tastes in entertainment have changed since Mallory's time. The top Arthurian knights are superheroes able to defeat whole fields of lesser men, but they lack the sort of strange traits and tragic backstories that distinguish modern superheroes. On the contrary they are all pretty much the same – they fight the same way, dress the same way, and they have the same virtues (courage, loyalty, courtesy) and the same vices (pride, anger). All fight scenes are described in exactly the same way. I skipped several chapters of this questing and fighting, thinking I had heard enough.

The two pieces of the story that are somewhat different come at the beginning and the end: at the beginning, the birth of Arthur, Merlin's meddling, and the Sword in the Stone thing, and at the end, the fall of Camelot. Mallory relates Arthur's boyhood in pretty much the way you remember it. But Arthur's fall is an utter mess of a story. In this version Arthur basically lets Gawain bully him into a pointless war with Lancelot – pointless because it starts when Lancelot is accused of being the lover of Queen Guinevere, but it isn't true, so it's all just a dumb mistake that leads us into fifty more fights between knights, each exactly like all the others, and the fall of Arthur and Camelot for nothing. Mordred doesn't even come across as much of a traitor. 

Listening to this folly I felt my boredom warring with my frustration.

My recommendation is that if you have any interest in Arthur you stick to modern versions that conform better to our idea of what a story is supposed to be.

A Russian Bemoans the State of Russian Power

This, via Natalka on Twitter/X, is supposed to be an essay by a Russian named Igor Dimitriev. I have not been able to find the source, since there seem to be about a thousand people named Igor Dimitriev, but this is certainly interesting despite the machine translation. Dimitriev notes that in January 2022 Russia seemed to be rising in power and influence, using the CTSO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) to dominate much of the old Soviet Union. Now, not so much:

Even the memory of that brief euphoria that accompanied the entry of the CSTO [forces] into Kazakhstan in January 2022 is gradually fading. Then it seemed that Russia was the guarantor of stability, the arbitrator, the center of power. Now there is nothing left of that feeling.

Kazakhstan is confidently following its own path, forming its own security strategy. It signed a military cooperation plan with Great Britain, including the training of officers in British military academies. It is building a plant with its Singapore partners to produce 155 mm ammunition, NATO standard. It is introducing a territorial reserve system based on Western models. (There was even a scandal there recently with the local analogue of the Territorial Center of Recruitment). All this in a paradigm where Russia is seen not as an ally, but as a potential threat.

Azerbaijan has finally liquidated Armenian Artsakh [Nagorno-Karabakh] without regard for the CSTO and killed Russian peacekeepers. After the downed plane in December 2024, it publicly demanded an apology and compensation from Moscow, closed the offices of Russian government agencies. Aliyev acts openly - he is increasing cooperation with Ukraine, supplying humanitarian aid, and avoiding even formal neutrality.

Armenia - in the past, the main ally in the Caucasus - has effectively left the Russian orbit. Pashinyan has repeatedly announced his withdrawal from the CSTO, the country recalled its permanent representative to the organization, and closed Russian propaganda channels.

Uzbekistan has ignored the CSTO since 2012 and is actively developing partnership with Europe through summits and sectoral agreements.

Last year, there was tension between Moscow and Tashkent in connection with the assassination attempt on one of the government officials and the alleged "Chechen trace".

Instead of neutral Finland, there is now a 1,300 km border with NATO. Sweden, which remained neutral even during the Second World War, participates in NATO military exercises and supplies weapons to Ukraine. The entire north of Europe is reorganizing its armed forces for joint exercises in the Arctic and the Baltic.

All of Europe is turning into a single anti-Russian coalition. Germany is reorienting its production capacities to military orders. The EU's defense spending is aimed at 5% of GDP. For the first time, a single European military budget has appeared.

Syria, which recently played the role of a showcase for Russian geopolitical influence, is now a platform for the mass execution of pro-Russian elements. The Russian bases in Syria are the most vulnerable issue for [Russia’s] African initiatives.

Over the past three years, the security architecture in Eurasia has changed radically. Russia is no longer a regional leader, a political center, or a guarantor of stability. Geopolitical weight is not just decreasing — it is being reset. In fact, the entire scale of Russia's foreign policy today is tactical battles in the Donetsk and Sumy regions.

What was intended as a quick regime change in Kyiv has turned into a protracted meat grinder, devouring the country's geopolitical capital. The entire military machine is focused on storming Ukrainian villages. All resources are squeezed out for the sake of a front that is barely moving.

Where everything is heading was clear back in 2022. Nevertheless, the leadership of the Russian Federation has been hammering away at the Ukrainian defense with maniacal persistence.

Apparently, the Kremlin believes that if they manage to destroy Ukraine, all the problems will dissolve on their own and 2021 will return. However, by the time Ukraine collapses - if it collapses at all - the world around will be completely different. Well, yes, we haven't even touched on the issue of sanctions, loss of markets, total dependence on China.

What does Russia get in return? Compliments from an inadequate American president and visits from African leaders. Oh, and regular calls and visits from world leaders with an offer to... end the war.

Previously, Russia was surrounded by a buffer zone of formal neutrality; now it is surrounded by a system of defensive alliances, where Moscow often has neither allies nor intermediaries.

Such tectonic shifts are irreversible. This very fact suggests that the geopolitical “special operation” has led to the exact opposite of its goals.

Immigration Confusion in Los Angeles

The people involved in the thus-far minor violence in Los Angeles no doubt have many motives. Trump wants to appear tough, and he may, as some critics say, be looking to stoke violence to justify the seizure of more power. The people fighting him may be opposing that power grab, or ICE's inhumanity to immigrants, or the myth of immigrant crime, and many other things. I am not trying to judge them or sort out the strains of their various pains and angers.

I want to take a view from a gondola high above the fray.

From on high, I see America's confusion about immigration playing out in random squabbles on the street.

Americans as a group have a ridiculously two-faced attitude toward immigrants. Every poll I have ever seen shows that a majority wants less immigration. But everywhere I look I see an American that depends absolutely on immigrants, and one without any appetite for the measures that would really reduce the flow.

We need immigrants as workers. There are about 48 million immmigrants in the US, 15 percent of the population. The rate of employment is higher among immigrants than for the native born; at least 30 million of the roughly 163 million jobs in the US are held by immigrants. What would happen if they disappeared? The number of illegal immigrants is around 11 million, and the percentage of those who are working is even higher than for legal immigrants; big sectors of the American economy, especially agriculture and construction, would collapse without their help. "They take our jobs" is a ridiculous thing to say in a country with an unemployment rate below 4 percent. Back in 2017 Trump's own chief of staff said that we needed more immigrants, because America's businesses were "desperate" for more workers.

We depend on immigrants fiscally. If there is any hope of sustaining Medicare and Social Security for fifty more years it rests solely on immigrants. Unless we are willing to tax ourselves a lot more rigorously, we need a growing population to keep the system solvent. Since the native born are not even reproducing themselves these days, that means immigrants. Illegal immigrants are a particular boon here, since many of them pay into Social Security through fraudulent accounts but will not be able to get any money out.

Immigrants have made our food vastly better and more interesting. They make our cities more vibrant. They have saved hundreds of small towns that would otherwise have disappeared. They work harder than the native born, study harder in school, found more companies, win more Nobel prizes.

And yet people say they hate it. Every poll says so, and among some the feelings are very strong. Some of the rage against immigrants I have seen on Twitter/X shocks me, and I am pretty hard to shock.

So what are we doing about it? Not much. If we were serious about limiting border crossings, we would prosecute the people who hire migrants. But the people who hire them are businessmen in agriculture, construction, trucking, warehousing, and so on, so that never happens. I refer to the curious the Rudy Texeira's wonderful article about "border theater" in Texas, in which the Republican governor stages events like sending busloads of migrants to New York City while reassuring his big business supporters that nothing will happen to the workers they depend on.

What is happening is Los Angeles is what you get when people who are vital to our economy and living out an old American dream are also violating the law in a way that makes millions of  Americans very angry. The confusion in the streets mirrors the confusion in our politics, our economics, and our souls.

As Trump has pretty much admitted, ICE raids will never by themselves have a meaningful impact on illegal immigration. The strategy is to scare people into "self deporting." But what if they don't? What if, instead, they start pushing back? Trump's strategy so far is to escalate, to deploy ever greater force. But is the country really ready for that? 

Calling out the National Guard may help when you're dealing with a riot that happens to be concentrated in one place, but it is a lousy strategy for dealing with millions of people who have homes and jobs and just keep their heads down. Again, the best strategy would be to go after employers, and since that will never happen, here we are.

I have no idea where this will take us. Anger against immigrants is real, and looking around the world I see that immigration drives awful politics pretty much everywhere. But will we really opt to become a shrinking, declining nation, throwing away much of our energy and creativity in favor of bland mediocrity?

If people understood that this was the choice, what would they do?

Beats me. But I feel certain that these LA troubles are not the end of our immigration chaos, and I suspect that things may well got a lot worse in some places. Our policies here are fundamentally confused, because the things we want are in conflict with each other. People want to feel at home in a familiar place, but they also want to live in a wealthy and vibrant world. I do not know how to do both, and I not think anyone else does, either.

So, riots.

Mario Vargas Llosa, "The War of the End of the World"

Canudos

When Mario Vargas Llosa died a few months ago, I read several online tributes. Two people I follow wrote that while Vargas Llosa wrote several great books, none of them compare with this 1981 masterpiece. So I ordered a copy, which I just finished reading. It is indeed very fine.

The novel follows the strange but true tale of Belo Monte, a millenarian commune in northern Brazil. This part of Brazil had been devastated by a series of natural disasters, including a dire drought in 1878-1879 and a series of epidemics, that led to the complete abandonment of many plantations and even some small towns. Through that wrecked landscape a man came wandering: Antônio Conselheiro, known as The Counselor. The Counselor was an ascetic who dressed in rags and hardly ate, a sort of a prophet but also a defender of traditional Catholicism who revered priests and nuns. He preached against the new Brazilian Republic, secular marriage, the metric system, the census, and all other innovations, and he sometimes said that Jesus would soon return to purify the church and put a king back in charge. He gathered followers and for years they wandered the blighted region together, restoring churches, cleaning up graveyards, and listening to the Counselor's homilies. Eventually they settled down at a mostly abandoned place called Canudos. They built or rebuilt huts, planted fields, and began the construction of a large stone church. They called this place Belo Monte. The community grew until it held more than 5,000 houses. This peasant takeover of someone else's land led to an attack on Belo Monte by local militia, which was beaten off with heavy losses. The prospect of monarchist, traditionalist rebels defeating the militia while calling for destruction of the new Republic alarmed the authorities, and they launched a war against Belo Monte that went on until it was destroyed.

Learning what actually happened in Belo Monte is a hard problem. The sources were all written by outsiders after the war, and there is no particular reason to believe them. Enter Mario Vargas Llosa. 

The only photograph of Antônio Conselheiro, if this is even him

A serious scholar of Latin American history who had at various times been both a socialist revolutionary and a conservative politician, Vargas Llosa found in the tale of Canudos a perfect medium to express his vision of politics, war, and the human condition. Since we have no record of the people who joined the Counselor, and thus no clear idea of who they were and what they saw in him, Vargas Llosa simply imagined them. He gives us reformed bandits, ruined farmers, the surviving remnant of a wandering circus, a deformed cripple, a dwarf, people wracked by regret over obscure sins, an educated European who has been exiled because of his revolutionary activities, and more. They are fascinating in their brokenness, pathetic in their search for redemption, admirable in their determination to go on with life despite what they and their communities had endured. We see the Counselor only from the outside, so he remains mysterious to us, but we see how powerful his faith is to those who have lost everything else. Some of this exposition is very strange to read. But then Vargas Llosa was trying to cross the vast gulf between his own mind and those of hungry people who became the followers of a half-mad prophet, and surely that experience ought to be strange.

A politican himself, Vargas Llosa also lays out the political background to all of this, the factions maneuvering to bring back the empire, maintain the democratic republic, or install a military dictatorship. He shows us their public stands, their backroom meetings, the ways they manipulate the accounts printed in the newspapers they control. Canudos is a side issue to all of them, a wild card they try to play against each other, heedless of the broken lives of its inhabitants and their redemptive dreams. People will suffer and die, of course, but people always suffer and die. 

Survivors of Canudos, 1897

This is a book about a war, so there is a lot of fighting. But Vargas Llosa is concerned less with what happened than with how people felt about it. He explores the minds Brazilian officers, regular soldiers, a young surgeon confronting the horror of his first battle, frightened rebels, civilians trapped in the storm of war. Some of the government soldiers have grave doubts about what they are doing; sent to put down a monarchist rebellion, they instead find sad, confused, poverty-stricken people who turned in desperation to a man who promised them divine consolation. Yet they are soldiers, so they carry out the mission they were sent to do.

To me the most impressive thing about the book is the vast breadth of Vargas Llosa's vision, and of his sympathies. He is equally at home in the private studies of rich planters and the huts of hungry laborers; he understands the appeal of both democratic reform and religious tradition; he can make both army officers and a crazy prophet seem heroic. 

If you are tired of reading books by people who just don't seem to know much about the world, Vargas Llosa might be the writer for you. Because I have never read another novel by someone who seems to know so much, and who has tried so hard to understand so many different things.