Mongolian Shamanism

I've been reading about Mongolian shamanism. A few observations:

There isn't much emphasis on the shaman journeying to other lands; instead, the role of the shaman is to communicate with spiritual beings and placate them with rituals. The exorcism of demons is a common rite.

Men and women can both be shamans, and little is said about any difference between them.

For the past 800 years, Mongolian shamanism has gotten mixed up with Buddhism. The more Buddhist sort of religion is called Yellow Shamanism, presumably because the Tibetan Buddhism that influenced it was called Yellow Buddhism. Shamans who reject Buddhist influence are called Black Shamans; some sources say this school formed in the 1700s as a reaction against Buddhist and Chinese influence.

Shamans recognize a variety of spiritual beings. The most important category is the 99 Tenger, or Tingri,  which is sometimes translated "gods" but some aren't very powerful. The Tenger are divided into 55 associated with the color white and the east, who are generally well-disposed toward humans, and 44 associated with black and the west, who are generally hostile or at least grouchy. Some sources say that most shamans specialize and only communicate with one sort of Tenger, but others deny this.

Shamans also venerate the spirits of the ancestors. These are usually the ancestors of their own family or clan, perhaps even recently deceased people that the shaman knew; but on the other hand Genghis  Khan is venerated as the great ancestor of all Mongols. Some sources indicate that Genghis Khan is particularly venerated by black shamans who oppose Chinese/Buddhist influence.

Plus there are lots of other, lesser beings: nature spirits, spirits of game animals, spirits of springs and streams, and so on. Living beings also have spirits that a shaman can access through arcane means. 

Shamans venerate the vault of heaven, which makes sense for people living on the open steppes but also may reflect Chinese influence.

More recently, Mongolia was under Soviet domination, and many sources speak of a major revival in shamanism after the Soviet Union fell, as part of Mongolians asserting their national identity and trying to reclaim their traditions.

One of the most important rites is fire sacrifice, which is traditionally performed in mid-winter. This involves building fires, roasting several kinds of meat, and singing long songs; here is a snippet:

We drop melted grease on
Your flame and pray for you;
We may stay in boundless ecstasy
By having numberless animals
By sanctifying this holy spirit of worship;
Let our animals increase
Let our life be longer
Let us live in incomparable rapture;
We beseech the offerings
From magnanimous mother-fire
Whose origins are from heaven
Whose birth was from earth. . . .

The rite is surrounded by taboos, for example:

• It is forbidden to stoke a fire with an iron poker within a week of the ceremony of worshiping fire (this is considered to be a period of the absence of the fire-god);
• Maternal nieces are forbidden to enter when the maternal uncle’s ceremony of worshiping fire is performed;
• It is forbidden to give dairy products and grains to somebody within three days of the ceremony of worshipping fire;
• Mothers who recently gave birth are forbidden to come near the burning fire;
• It is forbidden to burn anything that can defile a fire or make it dirty;
• It is forbidden to pour water on a fire.

Mongolian shamans practice several sorts of divination, for example by throwing dice and looking into mirrors.

And, finally, many Mongolian shamans now make their livings performing for tourists, which probably means they have all the conflicts about who practices the real tradition and who just puts on shows for tourists that also bedevil shamanism in South America.

Men and Women as Readers

Interesting that fantasy is close to the middle. Via Robin Hanson on Twitter/X.

The Lough Kinale Book Shrine

This amazing artifact was found in an Irish lake back in 1986, and was conserved very carefully over the next 39 years. It is now on display at the Irish National Museum. Incidentally a "book shrine" is just a fancy cover for a religious book, what others would call a treasure binding.

It likely dates to the 9th century. How it ended up on the bottom of a smallish lake is anybody's guess.

Links 27 June 2025

The Bamberg Casket, Viking art from the 10th century

The first Vancouver street given a new, unpronounceable Native name. More name changes are planned, but people are already protesting the first one. Serious question: after people, as they will, shorten this to some kind of easy to say nickname, or turn it into a joke, possibly an offensive joke, will anything have been gained in the way of restoration to Native peoples?

At a conference for OCD sufferers. (Harpers)

Asking whether Doomsters believe what they say.

List of remarkably successful undergraduate theses, on Twitter/X. Via Marginal Revolution. One led to a Noble Prize. This list doesn't include one of the most famous, Maya Lin's design for the Vietnam Memorial in DC. 

The amazing classical portrait busts of the Torlonia Collection.

New theory proposes that space time "remembers" everything that happens. Not sure if this is interesting and radical, or more evidence that physicists are floundering without a clue. (Summary on Reddit, another on LinkedIn, paywalled article at New Scientist.)

New residue studies suggest that tobacco smoking goes back 2,500 years on the Columbian Plateau. Incidentally tobacco varieties from South America seem to have spread across all of North America well before European contact.

This video begins, I kid you not, "One math equation could cause reality itself to break down, and no one knows how to stop it." And this is a snippet of an interview with Terrence Tao; shouldn't the kind of people who watch interviews with famous mathematicians understand the absurdity of that claim? Incidentally the Terrence Tao interview with Lex Fridman is interesting; Tao comes across as someone whose mind works so fast that he has trouble slowing down enough to communicate his ideas to the rest of us.

Colossal marble head found in Rome.

Where do African economic statistics come from? "In 2010, I returned to Zambia and found that the national accounts now were prepared by one man alone."

Tyler Cowen summarizes what sounds like an interesting essay by Ted Gioia about why songs and movies are getting longer in the smartphone age.

Amazing medical news: "A single infusion of a stem cell-based treatment may have cured 10 out of 12 people with the most severe form of type 1 diabetes. One year later, these 10 patients no longer need insulin. The other two patients need much lower doses." (NY Times)

Short biography of Chen Jingrun, a Chinese mathematician who did important work in number theory but was then targeted, beaten unconscious, and imprisoned by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. He continued doing mathematical work in secret during his enforced labor service. It is hard to overestimate the impact of the Cultural Revolution on Chinese intellectuals.

Excellent NY Times feature on water use in Los Angeles; despite the growing population, total water use in the city has fallen 32% since 1990. "How did this happen? The answer speaks to a general truth about progress, which, in big, messy democracies, tends to occur not all at once but in incremental, often unsexy ways, mostly out of the news cycle."

Moving 25-minute video on the elimination of smallpox as a triumph of two revolutions, one scientific and one humanitarian. Via Marginal Revolution.

Conservative Twitter/X is a swamp. And Elon is one of the worst offenders.

Pondering all those very early galaxies observed by the Webb Telescope, a group of physicists have argued that their light, passing through the dust-dense early universe, generated heat, and they say this invalidates all conclusions that have been drawn from the Cosmic Microwave Backgroud. (Original paper, news article, short video from Sabine Hossenfelder)

Are technology and capitalism making life too smooth and easy, so that we no longer have "experiences?" Seems to me that there is plenty of "experience" out there for people who want it, so if some folks prefer Carnival cruises, I don't see how that's a problem.

Old school gay activist Andrew Sullivan against the radicalism of the LGTBQ+ movement. (NY Times) Noting that public opinion is moving against the trans activists, he writes "Americans are broadly fine with transgender people. They are fine with gay people. They just reject replacing the fact of biological sex with the phantasms of gender ideology." 

Scott Siskind delves into the question of why twin studies find that many traits are highly inheritable while genetic studies can't find much evidence that genes are behind it. Kind of long and confusing, which was my main takeaway. We know that heredity occurs but have only the most meager understanding of how it works.

America's prisons are emptying. (Twitter/X) With many more prisoners leaving the system than entering, our incarceration rate is set to fall in a few years from 5th highest in the world to 200th.

Magnificent rant against Hezbollah from a Lebanese television host, with the refrain Leave us. "When we look at you all we hear is war, and all we smell is death." (Twitter/X)

Detailed thread on the status of Iran's nuclear program from Dmitri Alperovitch. (Twitter/X)

Alex Tabarrok summarizes an amusing but paywalled Matt Levine piece on the bizarre economics of used cooking oil.

One of Scott Siskind's readers tells you more than you want to know about Alpha School, an online speed-learning academy. I haven't read it because it is 17,600 words long (plus charts), which I find absurd.

Bronze Roman "wrist purse" found in Czech Republic.

New, anti-immigrant party rising in Japan: "Voters afraid of ‘scary foreigners’ propel Sanseito before election."

But I guess things aren't so bad in Japan, since the death of Princess Aiko's dog made the front page.

Geologists report finding rocks in Canada that are 4.16 billion years old, which would make them the oldest known.

Summary of Iran's missile attacks on Israel: "Iran fired 525 missiles at Israel over the past 12 days according to the ⁦ @haaretzcom⁩ tracker. 30 got through and hit built-up areas causing a total of 28 deaths. The rest (94%) were either intercepted, mis-fired or fell in uninhabited areas."

Study of Israeli missile defense during the latest conflict, based on videos shot in Jordan, says the US used a minimum of 39 THAAD interceptors, which would cost around $495 million, and Israel used a minimum 43 Arrow interceptors. Some awesome video at the link.

Very negative take on what Israel achieved from Michael Young on Twitter/X.

Putin explains his goal one more time for the thick-headed: "I consider the Russian and Ukrainian people to be one people. In that sense all Ukraine is ours."

Amazing short video of Israeli missiles intercepting an Iranian IRBM.

Have We Lost the Future?

From Ross Douthat's interesting interview (NY Times) with Peter Thiel:

Well, I think there are deep reasons the stagnation happened. . . .

People ran out of ideas. I think, to some extent, the institutions degraded and became risk averse, and some of these cultural transformations we can describe. But then I think to some extent people also had some very legitimate worries about the future, where if we continued to have accelerating progress, were you accelerating toward environmental apocalypse or nuclear apocalypse or things like that?

But I think if we don’t find a way back to the future, I do think that society — I don’t know. It unravels, it doesn’t work.

The middle class — I would define the middle class as the people who expect their kids to do better than themselves. And when that expectation collapses, we no longer have a middle-class society. Maybe there’s some way you can have a feudal society in which things are always static and stuck, or maybe there’s some way you can ship to some radically different society. But it’s not the way the Western world, it’s not the way the United States has functioned for the first 200 years of its existence.

I think Thiel's observations about a middle class society being invested in the future are astute. So, perhaps, as I have written here before, the reason our public mood is so bad is that nobody is excited about the future. I don't think I know a single person who expects the world to be better in ten years than it is now.

Thiel of course thinks the solution is to move fast and break things, abolish regulations, cut taxes, slash the government, unleash high-tech capitalism, etc., and he regards the reluctance of voters to embrace those policies as a main driver of our "stagnation." ("We should take a lot more risk.") But even he seems unsure that this would work; when Douthat talks about Trump and Musk maybe ushering an era of bold risk-taking, Thiel says, "You’re framing it really, really optimistically here."

As an aside, I appreciated this comment from Thiel about getting involved in politics: "I am schizophrenic on this stuff. I think it’s incredibly important, and it’s incredibly toxic. . . . It’s zero sum. It’s crazy."

And here is Thiel on AI:

One question we can frame is: Just how big a thing do I think A.I. is? And my stupid answer is: It’s more than a nothing burger, and it’s less than the total transformation of our society. My place holder is that it’s roughly on the scale of the internet in the late ’90s. I’m not sure it’s enough to really end the stagnation. . . .

It’s a little bit unhealthy that it’s so unbalanced. This is the only thing we have. I’d like to have more multidimensional progress. I’d like us to be going to Mars. I’d like us to be having cures for dementia. If all we have is A.I., I will take it.

To me Thiel's attitude is puzzling because I think we are doing fine. But I have to pay attention because so many of my contemporaries share his view that our society is somehow stuck or broken, and he has a compelling take on why that is: because creeping bureaucracy and political logjams keep us from doing amazing things like going to the Moon or curing dementia, and this leads to societal depression, because we need regular bulletins from the exciting future to remain optimistic.

Because I don't think things in America are bad, I oppose radically shaking them up. So far as I can tell, most of the radicalism we have seen lately, whether that means MAGA rage against immigrants, "reconsidering" childhood vaccines, rioting against "capitalism," or Queers for Palestine, has actively made life worse. I do not see radical change as a likely or even plausible solution to whatever is troubling us.

If that condemns us to "stagnation," so be it. We live in a place that has great trouble keeping out the millions trying to get here, and that ought to give us pause about rolling the dice on some kind of big change. 

The Ayatollah's Strategy

Interesting piece in the NY Times by Vali Nasr:

If this history is anything to go by, Ayatollah Khamenei will not retreat, let alone surrender. He has, for now, accepted a cease-fire with Israel — but only because he is confident that Iran held its ground in the face of U.S. and Israeli strikes. In the past, too, he has made concessions when necessary. Tehran entered both the 2015 nuclear deal and the most recent round of nuclear negotiations with the United States in order to relieve economic pressure.

Ayatollah Khamenei is uninterested in making compromises that could fundamentally change Iran’s trajectory. He is wary of even appearing open to compromise, which he believes the United States would interpret as weakness. “America is like a dog,” he told his advisers in a meeting over a decade ago. “If you back off, it will lunge at you, but if you lunge at it, it will recoil and back off.”

Iran’s supreme leader has instead sought an equilibrium that can be summarized as “no war and no peace.” He wants neither confrontation nor normalization with the United States. What he wants is for Washington to stop containing Iran, unshackle its economy and allow Iran to embrace the status of a regional great power.

Ayatollah Khamenei believes that Iran can achieve this goal in time. If Tehran perseveres, he thinks, it can outlast Washington and Israel’s appetite for a fight.  

As a minimal sort of strategy, this is plausible, but it ignores the vast gains Iran could achieve by actually making peace.

Stationary Bandits in the DRC

There is a theory of state formation, associated with people like Mancur Olson and James Scott, in which which early states are modeled as parasitic predators. Matt Yglesias: 

A settled farming community can produce more food than it needs to survive, which means that raiders can profitably steal it. But as Mancur Olson pointed out in his later work, as profitable as banditry may be, a skilled group of warriors might decide that it’s even more profitable to act as “stationary bandits.”

Instead of sporadically raiding farming communities, stationary bandits live nearby and tax them — they are, in other words, the government. 

As a generalized model of state formation, I find this lacking; in particular I do not think it applies to the earliest states we know anything about, in Sumer and Egypt. But there certainly are cases in which conquering elites have acted in exactly this way. As Yglesias puts it, this view is "cynical about government, but not entirely negative."

One of Olson’s points is that stationary bandits, unlike roving ones, have some genuine interest in encouraging the communities they govern to prosper. They need to protect their victims from other bands of bandits. If they provide things like law and order, basic infrastructure, and other growth-oriented public services, then there’s more tax revenue to secure. 

So they may end up being pretty good governors; a famous example here might be Tamerlane, who was a brutal conqueror but under whose rule the cities of central Asia thrived like never before.

In a fascinating paper, an American professor named Raúl Sánchez de la Sierra uses the chaotic eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a laboratory for considering stationary bandit theory. The most valuable products of this region are two minerals, gold and coltan. The prices of both have fluctuated dramatically over the past twenty-five years. When the price is high, the returns to controlling the trade are very high in local terms. So those high prices lead local armed groups, whether militias or units on the Congolese Army, so set themselves up as stationary bandits:

The first result is that, in response to an increase in the price of coltan, armed actors create monopolies of violence; that is, they emerge as “stationary bandits” (Olson 1993), create illegal customs to tax mining output, and provide protection in the mines where coltan is produced— thus creating Tilly (1985)’s “essential functions of a state.”

Sánchez de la Sierra also found that price spikes in the two different materials led to different behavior by armed groups:

A positive demand shock for coltan, a mineral whose bulky output cannot be concealed, leads armed actors to create illicit customs and provide protection at coltan mines, where they settle as “stationary bandits.” A similar shock for gold, easy to conceal, leads to stationary bandits in the villages where income from gold is spent, where they introduce illicit mining visas, taxes, and administrations. 

They also set up courts that adjudicate disputes, punish thieves, and other judicial functions.

The hardest part of the study, and the one that raises the most questions for me, concerns the incomes of people in these areas. The methods used are described in detail in the paper, but for me they did not inspire confidence; basically, Sánchez de la Sierra and his assistants did a lot of interviews. But, anyway, this is his finding:

Having a stationary bandit from a militia or the Congolese army increases welfare. These findings suggest that armed actors may create “essential functions of a state” to better expropriate, which, depending on their goals, can increase welfare.

Very interesting.

It Keeps Getting Weirder

So Trump and the Emir of Qatar have arranged a cease-fire between Israel and Iran. Which both sides promptly violated, which led Trump to publicly berate both sides:

We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.

Which as a summary of Middle Eastern politics has much to recommend it. As of Tuesday afternoon, there is no news of attacks, so for now the cease fire holds.

The real reason for the cease-fire has to be that both sides agree with Decker Eveleth's assessment, which I posted here a few days ago: 

Neither side has demonstrated the capability they need to end the conflict on favorable terms to them.

Israel's decapitation strike did not disable Iran's military, their bombs only did limited damage to Iran's nuclear sites, and their air force is probably reaching the end of its ability to continue large nightly strikes. (Pilots, aircraft, and missile stockpiles all have limits.) 

Meanwhile Iran's ballistic missile attacks were diminishing and they seemed to be running out of missiles about as fast as Israel was running out of interceptors. Since they have apparently decided not to try interfering with oil shipping through the Straight of Hormuz, I'm not sure what other options they had.

So, exhaustion, declining returns on their efforts, etc.

But is anything resolved? Inspectors from the IAEA says they have not detected any increased radiation in Iran's air, which probably means that no bombs hit stores of uranium. (Unless maybe far underground? I have no idea about that.) Which is a good thing for people in the region, but if nothing was destroyed but a few dozen centrifuges, what did Israel accomplish? Report are coming out today that purport to be based on early US intelligence assessments of our own strike, and they all look like this:

Early US intel assessment suggests that the strikes on Iran did not destroy nuclear sites. Core components of the country’s nuclear program are still intact and the program is likely only set back by months.

I can't see that anything about regional politics has really changed. It would be great if this defeat emboldens people in Iran to overthrow their government, but I don't see that happening. Instead the news from Iran is of "victory rallies," with regime supporters paryting in the streets to celebrate their survival.

(Incidentally, the Ukrainian bloggers I follow are disappointed in Israel and Trump, and really wanted them to keep bombing until Iran had endured at least as much suffering as the Shaheds have imposed on Ukraine. Several people in my Ukraine feed reposted a cartoon that shows a Russian and a Ukrainian watching the US and Israeli bombing campaigns and saying, "You fight like pussies.")

The only clear winner in this fiasco seems to be Donald Trump, who has been on a roll. Here's another Turmpian gem:

As you know, Vladimir Putin called me and asked 'Can I help you with Iran?'

I said 'No, I don't need help with Iran. I need help with you.' 

I mean, I don't think his strike accomplished much beyond 1) showing support for Israel, and 2) reminding Iran that facilities deep underground can, in fact, be bombed. But nobody else has been able to solve this problem, either, so that would be a lot to ask of a deranged orange narcissist. Glad that he put his personal reputation behind the cease fire when that could easily have gone badly for him.

If this cease fire holds, my overall response is going to be "it could have been a lot worse." But it would probably have been better not to do it at all.

UPDATE

From this morning's breakfast conversation here: "If Trump is the sanest person in the room, that's a really crazy room."

Aftermath

Some negative reactions:

Jeffrey Lewis (aka Arms Control Wonk):

Why am I so unimpressed by these strikes? Israel and the US have failed to target significant elements of Iran's nuclear materials and production infrastructure. RISING LION and MIDNIGHT HAMMER are tactically brilliant, but may turn out to be strategic failures.

Lewis says that so far as we know, Iran's store of highlly enriched uranium (60%) was in tunnels at a site that hasn't been attacked yet, but it may well have been moved, so right now we have no idea where it is. It still needs further refinement to get it to bomb grade, but Iran may have more centrifuges in other buried sites, so that isn't a major barrier. But the hardest thing about making a bomb isn't anything physical, it's knowledge. It's hard to bomb knowledge, and once a program is set up, you no longer need those top famous scientists, just a lot of skilled techs.

Let's say Iran decides to rush a bomb. Iran can install ~1.5 cascades a week. In six weeks, it could have 9 cascades of IR-6 machines. It would take those machines about 60 days to enrich all 400 kg to WGU. Altogether that's about five months.

Decker Eveleth:

I largely agree with Jeffrey here, and the same logic applies to the Iranian missile program. It appears Israel and US believed that Iran was at the cusp of deploying ICBMs (per @DefenseIntel) and large numbers of missiles, enough to overwhelm Israel.

So Israel has been targeting critical linkages in Iranian missile production, like mixing facilities to destroy difficult to make industrial planetary mixers. But these facilities can always be rebuilt, and sanctions can always be evaded.

Once the tech has been figured out, there is nothing stopping Iran from rebuilding everything that Israel has destroyed in five years - perhaps now with a more aggressive, North Korean style quick-launch missile posture.

Those who are defending the strike basically fall back on the "mow the grass" scenario:

They can also be hit again. It’s a mistake to view this as a one off campaign.

To which Eveleth responds:

But that is my point. Israel seems willing to lock itself into a forever war they can never really win.

Which is why, I guess, Israel is hoping for Iranian regime change; because they don't see any other way to end the violence.

Since October 7, Israel has imposed major losses on three of its main military opponents: Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, plus the Assad regime was overthrown by its own people (with Turkish help). Their military should feel good about their accomplishments.

But how much better is their political situation? The problem of the Palestinians remains, despite millions of Israelis praying every day that they will simply disappear. The Netanyu government would love to ethnically cleanse them out of Gaza, but that would mean finding someplace for them to go. Israel's successful belligerence has reinforced the admiration that fans of successful belligerence have long felt for them. But others are increasingly exasperated with them, and though the Trump administration may be trying hard to clamp down on pro-Palestinian protests, the anti-Israel sentiment is still common, including among some of Trump's biggest supporters. So far as I can tell, in the US at least antisemitism really seems to have gotten worse over the past decade.

No doubt Iran's military has been heavily damaged. Hundreds of missiles may have been destroyed. Perhaps its bomb program has been set back months or years. But I can't see how the attack on Iran has radically improved Israel's strategic situation. I also don't know what the strike has done for the US. Ok, we showed off our stealth bombers and our big bombs, and did a solid for our Israeli friends. But if Trump is serious about wanting to stop all Iranian enrichment, this is only one step and many more will be required. That would involve negotiations, as Trump himself has said many times. Have we made those negotiations harder or easier? Beats me.

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.