The Wari Empire dominated the south-central highlands and the west coastal regions of what is now Peru from 500–1000 AD. Their capital was in the dry coastal lands, and many cloth and wooden artifacts have been found in tombs there, besides the wonderful pottery vessels in the shape of humans and animals.
Back in 2003, I tried to join in the protests against Bush II's looming invasion of Iraq. I fulminated against it on my old web site and attended a huge rally in Washington. I did not enjoy the rally.
The message of the day was "No Blood for Oil." I thought and still think this was entirely the wrong framing. What I wanted to protest was the belief on the part of Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz & company that the world can be changed by spasmodic acts of extreme violence. We were confronted with a deep and complex problem, the confluence of economic misery and political oppression across the Middle East that seemed to be spawning mass terrorism. Faced with this deep and complex problem, Bush & company opted for a very simple solution: smash somebody. They pretended that Saddam had some connection to 9-11, but administration insiders later admitted that this was a pretext. They wanted to change the Middle East. They fantasized that the way to do this was with tanks and stealth aircraft, by blowing up buildings and killing people.
I am not a pacifist; I supported, for example, the first Gulf War. Reversing Saddam's conquest of Kuwait seemed to me like the kind of thing that a military can accomplish. Revolutionizing a whole region, not so much.
Vladimir Putin saw Ukraine drifting ever closer to the EU and NATO and decided that he could revolutionize its politics with a three-day Special Military Operation. Have a hard problem? Just send in the tanks! But he didn't have the US Air Force, and he did not even achieve his minimal goal of taking Kyiv and installing a new government. If he had, I suspect he would have found that in solving that one problem he had only created a million more problems. He fell for the fantasy of violence, the dream that the world can be changed by smashing things. Russia is paying a terrible price for his mistake.
Although I have spent my whole adult life protesting against police violence, I hated the George Floyd riots. Bad relations between the police and the community they are supposed to serve is not the kind of problem that can be solved by smashing things.
Looking at the violence of ICE, I see the same fallacy at work. The world is not going the way you want, so smash somebody. Some of you may thing that this is a specific response to immigration, but I disagree. I think people like Trump hate immigration because they see immigrants as dirty, disgusting people who degrade the country be being here; they are just one aspect of a nebulous threat by the hippie/communist/unwashed/disgusting/gay/trans/criminal/terrorist consortium. Some of you may think it is just racism; but then why do MAGA people especially gloat when ICE beats up white protesters?
I see the fantasy of violence in action. If the world is not great, if your life is not great, you imagine that this is because of enemies, and things can be made better by smashing those enemies.
This is all wrong. It is wicked, stupid, and will drive America in exactly the direction people like Stephen Miller claim to hate: toward anarchy, turmoil, conflict, and economic decline.
If you want an orderly society, a cohesive society, a peaceful, productive, thriving society, you must start, not by smashing people, but by listening to them.
Tonight, the universe is conspiring in your favor.
So what should I do tonight? Place a big bet on an NBA game?
Actually what I will probably do is write, so maybe the universe will help me produce something brilliant.
It occurs to me, though, that while I opened this fortune cookie this morning, we had our Chinese take-out last night; so was this fortune supposed to apply to last night? If so, the universe really let me down.
Jess Steier, Elana Pearl Ben-Joseph, Jen Covich Bordenick, and David Higgins:
Recently, the Texas attorney general launched a formal investigation into what he called “unlawful financial incentives” for childhood vaccines, saying that he would “ensure that Big Pharma and Big Insurance don’t bribe medical providers to pressure parents to jab their kids.”
The timing was uncanny. The four of us had just completed a six-month investigation into this exact question: Do pediatricians get rich from vaccines?
Our answer, after analyzing available commercial reimbursement data from four major insurers across all 50 states, reviewing state Medicaid fee schedules, and interviewing pediatricians about the financial realities of vaccine delivery: no. . . .The economics vary dramatically depending on where you practice and who you serve. In Colorado, commercial insurers pay a median of $42 for vaccine administration; Medicaid pays $21. In Mississippi, commercial rates hover around $22, while Medicaid pays just $11.68, well below what it actually costs to store and administer a vaccine.
That's why many doctors have stopped giving vaccines to adults; because it costs so much to store and administer vaccines that they lose money. Like most Americans I get all my vaccines at the pharmacy, because the volume of shots they give greatly reduces their storage costs, and they have lower overhead than physicians' offices.
The big numbers being thrown around about payments for giving vaccines relate to insurance company "quality programs," some of which do indeed pay doctors for giving vaccines. That's because they reward doctors for doing things that limit future costs to insurers, and giving people vaccines has enormous payoff in terms of reducing future hospitalizations etc. But those are broad programs that pay related to all sorts of metrics, of which giving vaccines is only one. And, remember, insurance companies do this because these programs reduce their costs in the long run.
Another point about the bogus numbers is that the people spreading them seem to think that the whole amount paid to the practice is income to the doctor, which is of course not true; again, many doctors actually lose money giving childhood vaccines, especially with Medicaid patients. They do it anyway because they know how important it is.
The older I get, the more strongly I believe that the most important thing we can do is to defend civilization. There is no guarantee that this astonishingly rich world we have built will endure; plenty of other civilizations have collapsed or faded back into anarchy and village life. We have to defend it against all kinds of threats: random violence, police corruption, ethnic hate, divisive politics, environmental poisons, outside enemies with hypersonic missiles. We especially need to defend it against forgetting. We are too quick to forget dangers once they fade from the headlines, too quick to forget lessons learned in the fires of World War and violent revolution. I am a liberal, which means I think things could be better and support various reforms intended to make them so. But I never forget that my life depends, not on my party winning, but on the survival of our civilization in the face of a chaotic universe.
Jakub Janovsky of Oryx runs the numbers on Russian armored vehicles. Finds that 1) the Russian armored vehicle force is about the same size as it was when the war started, even though the army is more than 40% larger, and 2) the Soviet vehicle stockpile is largely exhausted. (Twitter/X)
A Ukrainian ground drone with a machine gun captures three Russian soldiers.
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One supposes this was some kind of punishment, but given how the Russians are operating, who knows? The whole scene summarizes for me the awful waste and inhumanity of Putin's terrible war.
There is another awful video going around these days that shows a Russian soldier sitting in a shell crater, surrounded by the corpses of seven or eight other Russians. He doesn't dodge or flinch or show any emotion as the drone flies at him, just sits there, staring straight at it, perhaps stunned by whatever killed his comrades, but perhaps welcoming an end to his nightmare.
Chicago reporter Dan Mihalopoulos on Twitter/X:
We’ve covered lots of losing teams on the back page of the paper. But none with a record as bad as the Chicago DOJ during Operation Midway Blitz:
- 0 conviction
- 11 charges dropped
- 3 no-billed cases
- 1 jury acquittal
And James Queally of the LA Times:
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in L.A. has lost every case it brought to trial against a protester who allegedly attacked a federal LEO last year. A number of other cases were dismissed or rejected by grand juries.
If you want you can find whole collections of videos on TikTok or YouTube Shorts of judges angrily dismissing charges brought by various Trump lackeys.
As these people note, Federal prosecutors usually win most of the cases they bring, and legal insiders like to repeat the old joke that a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. So this is a remarkably bad record.
Plus, Trump has threatened all sorts of political figures with investigation for their parts in opposing January 6 or other Trump "initiatives," but none of them have been convicted of anything. So far as I am aware, none of the lawsuits he has threatened against news organizations has ever led to a trial and a loss for his opponents, although lots of people have settled out of court.
What are we to make of this? Should we be reassured that Trump's people are so incompetent? Pleased that their clumsy crackdown is generating so much opposition?
If you really wanted to weaponize the law, would you make Pam Bondi the AG and put a complete idiot in charge of the FBI?
Is the point just harassment, intimidating people into silence by the threat of a few days in jail?
Or is it to wear Americans down until we no long react at all when Federal officers commit outrages? To make this into the new normal?
Is it just a reflexive burst of rage against immigrants and people who support them?
It feels like an extremely clumsy move to me, bad enough to generate widespread outrage but not so bad as to really intimidate the country.
Am I missing something? What, really, is this all about?
From “The Creeping Man”:
“You will excuse a certain abstraction of mind, my dear Watson,” said he. “Some curious facts have been submitted to me within the last twenty-four hours, and they in turn have given rise to some speculations of a more general character. I have serious thoughts of writing a small monograph upon the uses of dogs in the work of the detective.”
“But surely, Holmes, this has been explored,” said I. “Bloodhounds—sleuth-hounds—”
“No, no, Watson, that side of the matter is, of course, obvious. But there is another which is far more subtle. You may recollect that in the case which you, in your sensational way, coupled with the Copper Beeches, I was able, by watching the mind of the child, to form a deduction as to the criminal habits of the very smug and respectable father.”
“Yes, I remember it well.”
“My line of thoughts about dogs is analogous. A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones. And their passing moods may reflect the passing moods of others.”
Fascinating old video clip.
Question: For those of us who reject Marx, can you offer any positive philosophy to help us toward a more hopeful future?
Russell: Well as to that, you see, I think one of the troubles of the world has been the habit of dogmatically believing something or other, and I think all of these matters are full of doubt. The rational man will not be too sure that he is right. I think that we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine. Not even mine! No, I think we should accept our philosophies with a measure of doubt.
What I do think is this: that if a philosophy is to bring happiness it should be inspired by kindly feeling. Now, Marx is not inspired by kindly feeling. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proleteriat. What he really wanted was the unhappiness of the bourgeois. And it was because of that negative element, because of that hate element, that his philosophy produced disaster. A philosophy that is to do good must be inspired by kindly feeling, not by unkindly feeling.
The Rediscovery of America (2023) is a bold attempt to retell American history with a focus on Indians: what they did, what they suffered, and how their choices shaped their own lives and those of the broader nation. Blackhawk (a professor at Yale) makes no attempt to be comprehensive, which is a good thing given how enormous a comprehensive accounty would have to be. Instead he picks certain events, tribes, or invidivudals to receive attention, hoping to convey the overall story through these examples. Most of the time it works quite well – I have already written three posts based on these narratives (1, 2, 3) – and I recommend this book to the curious. It is clearly written, full of fascinating information, and well supported with citiations. For me the most interesting sections come at the end, since many histories of Indians peter out after Wounded Knee, leaving the impression that nothing much has happened to Indians since then. Actually a whole lot has happened, and Blackhawk gives it good coverage.
What really gets my attention, though, is the ambivalence and contradiction that surrounds such a book, and, beyond that, the ambivalence and contradiction that characterizes Indian life in the 21st century.
To begin with, this kind of scholarship is a European invention. Native Americans had their own ways of narrating the past, their own stories. What does it say that Ned Blackhawks thinks the best way to tell the story of his people is in a Germanic language, following the conventions of German scholarship?
This kind of ambivalence suffuses the text, especially the post-1890 chapters. If there is a theme to these chapters it is Indian resistance to "assimilation." Often Blackhawk has a specific kind of resistance in mind, which is the maintenance of Indian nations as separate governmental indentities with defined territories and bodies of citizens; the converse would be Indians giving up their tribal identities, moving to cities and becoming regular Americans, which is what various US government officials and bodies actively sought. But as I said in my post on Elizabeth Bender Roe Cloud, the Indians who were most effective in fighting this kind of assimilation were those who had gone far in a different kind, acquiring western-style educations and learning the intricacies of the American legal and political systems. To write this book, which is itself an act of resistance, Blackhawk assimilated himself deeply into European ways.
Like most Indian activists, Blackhawk devotes much attention to "poverty" on Indian reservations. But this is a western concept, and the measures generally proposed to fight it (jobs, development) are western solutions.
Blackhawk gives some attention to political changes on reservations, and the conflicts these have posed. On the enormous Colville Reservation in eastern Washington, several bands that had never been politically unified were thrown together. Their leaders eventually formed a "confederated" tribe and held an election for reservation leaders. But half the people didn't bother to vote, and several sent letters to the Bureau of Indian affairs protesting this usurpation of their own chiefs' power. The conflict between traditional tribal governance and Americn-style elected leaders has played out across Indian country, and while there is much sentimental attachment to tribal chiefs, whenever people get the chance to vote on this they opt for elected officials. Democracy is one part of American culture that most Indians seem to love. (Pickup trucks seem to be another.)
I also protest the framing that "assimilation" is something that whites have done to Indians. Step back and you see the same process taking place all over the world. Modernity destroys traditional cultures. Everywhere, without exception. Europe's peasant cultures are gone, as are those of Japan and Korea. Especially when we are talking about the Progressive era in the early 1900s, those folks were bent on assimilating everybody: poor whites, poor blacks, immigrants, you name it.
I am also on record several places arguing that sovereignty is a red herring, far less important than broader concerns like democracy, freedom, and money. If Indians really care about tribal sovereignty, I suppose they have a right to it, and they are welcome to it. But I do not see it as a solution to any problem I care about.
Here's another question to ponder: what alternative history of American Indians would have led to a better outcome than what we have now?
I find it hard to think of one. I am not a fan of Neolithic tribal life, and I feel confident that as soon as they met Europeans, millions of Indians would have tried to give it up and join the modern world. Given that Indian nations were always at war with each other, the need to buy guns and then canons would have driven them into the global economy. The vulnerability of Indians to Old World diseases would have wreaked its awful destruction regardless of what anybody did; especially given that collapse in population, Indians would have had a very hard time preventing mass European immigration. Nobody has been able to keep modernity out. You can think that making that choice for themselves would have been an important step right there, and maybe so, but modernization in Japan and China did not exactly come off without issues.
Which is not to say that the European conquest of the Americas was not an awful act, rife with atrocity; it was. But history is an awful act, rife with atrocity, and all the alternative paths I can imagine for Native America are also studded with awfulness and atrocity.
I have no interest in judging the choices made by American Indians. Many Americans envy their determination to maintain their own identities rather than being subsumed into the suburban masses. They can, if they wish, go to college and move to cities and get regular jobs, or they can stay attached to their reservations and throw themselves into whatever bits of their traditions remain. In one sense it is enviable, to have that choice.
But in another sense, to be neither wholly within or entirely outside western culture is a kind of curse, one that in the case of Indians leads to poverty, alcoholism, divorce, and sundry other woes. I am not aware of any people anywhere in the world that is making this work well for them.
Against the forces of history, technology, and culture, all of our choices are limited, and there are no perfect outcomes for anyone. I wish the best to all the Indians trying to make their way in our world, but I am dubious of Blackhawk's supposition that independent Indian nations and strong tribal identities are the right path for all Indians.
Ned Blackhawk:
Within most reservation communities, opportunities for travel, employment, and autonomy were so circumscribed that thousands sought work within staged human exhibitions at world's fairs, Wild West-themed traveling shows, and related tourist sites. . . .
The St. Louis World's Fair of 1904 was only the biggest of a long series of grand exhibitions focusing on the American west:
Each held permanent displays of Indians living within the fiar grounds or within "midway" spectacles led by the famed showman William "Buffalo Bill" Cody. Omaha's "Indian Congress" attracted over five hundred Native people from approximately three dozen tribes who spent three months living in a four-acre section within the exposition grounds. . . . While these performers were presented as primitives, complex adaptions characterized their lives. Some came willingly. Other were compelled by government officials or by economic need. As the Apache leader Geronimo recalled about his time selling handmade arrows at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Fair in St. Louis, "I had plenty money — more than I had ever owned." . . .
While performers like Cody and Geronimo attracted attention, many Native participants used their time in these urban spaces to publicize their community's concerns, to critique government policies, and to couteract public misconceptions. Lakota leader Henry Standing Bear, for example, wrote to the commissioner of Indian Affairs that members of his community wanted to attend the fair but "they want to come as men and not like cattles driving to a show . . . they do not wish that anyone will misrepresent our race." Similarly, Medicine Horse, who performed with Cody in Chicago, remained committed to ensuring that fairgoers developed a positive impression of Native people. According to one acount, he displayed "an apparent eagerness to talk. He is very interesting to listen to, and the information he gives . . . is of much interest and value.
One of the people determined to make the best use of the opportunities presented by the fairs was Potawatomi author Simon Pokagon:
In his manifesto, The Red Man's Rebuke, which he issued in birch-bark binding, Pokagon wrote pointedly, "We have no spirit to celebrate with you."
Pokagon tried to use the attention generated by the Columbian Expostion of 1893 to agitate for the return of Potawatomi lands; he failed in this, but he did succeed in generating much sympathetic press for Indian causes.
The image of Indians performing traditional dances for fair audiences but spending their spare time lobbying for their causes is quite wonderful. The ties they developed with white liberals led to Indians joining the protests against the wave of American imperialism launched by the Spanish American War, putting themselves forward as spokesmen for imperialism's victims.
Unfortunately nobody seems to know if the Indians who performed at the St. Louis World's Fair ever met and talked to the Filipino tribesmen who were also there, in a separate compound. But what an encounter that would have been.
Quotations are from Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America, 2023.
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde on Twitter/X:
Perhaps the fastest decline in fertility ever recorded has taken place in Guatemala’s poorest, least educated, and indigenous majority rural areas, where women’s rights are weakest, between 2006 and 2025.
In 2006, Guatemala’s total fertility rate was 3.8, comparable to that of a sub-Saharan African country. By 2025, it had fallen to 1.8, only slightly above the fertility rate of non-Hispanic Whites in the United States (around 1.6). At the current pace, Guatemala will have a lower fertility rate than non-Hispanic Whites in the U.S. before 2030.
Does your preferred explanation (women’s education, feminism, smartphones, or women choosing holidays in Bali over children) fit that pattern?
Trump at Davos, on housing affordability:
Every time you make it more affordable for somebody to own a house cheaply, you are actually hurting the value of those houses. I don't want to do anything to hurt the value of their house.
If I wanted to crush the housing market, I could do that so fast that people could buy houses. But you would destroy people who already have houses.
This is just one of many ways that our economic questions intersect with generational issues. Trump is saying that protecting existing homeowners, most of whom are over 40, is more important than helping young people buy homes. You see claims like this being thrown around a lot in "affordibility" debates.
The question also comes up over property taxes. If property taxes are assessed on actual valuation, then people who own houses in areas where property values rise can get hit with high tax bills, and they hate this. The most famous response is California's Proposition 13, which drastically limits how much the assessed value of houses can rise under one owner. But that means the tax burden falls much more heavily on those who have bought their homes more recently, that is, the young.
But even that is not enough for some grouchy oldsters, who are campaigning to avoid paying property taxes altogether. According to Google's AI, sixteen states have programs to reduce or eliminate the property taxes of people over 65. I have seem several online comments to the effect that it is "unfair" for people who have paid off their mortgages to have to keep paying property taxes, which strikes me as bizarre; why should you not have to pay taxes on your property now that you actually own it?
All of this seems to assume that old people are poor, which is simply not true. Some old people are poor, but on the whole people over 65 have vastly greater wealth than those under 35. The notion that the nation's richest cohort should have their property taxes slashed strikes me as absurd.
A compromise approach that has gained steam recently is called the "circuit breaker," which limits the property taxes of those over 65 to a certain percentage of their incomes, protecting them if their incomes collapse or their property values soar. Which makes some sense to me, but why should this only apply to people over 65?
But basically I just hate it when people launch campaigns on the assumption that they and people like them suffer in some unique way that demands the government's attention. We are all Americans and we should all ask, first, what is the best policy for everyone.
Scott Siskind on Scott Adams and "Dilbert," long but extremely interesting.
Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.
Perun on the US campaign against the "shadow fleet" and the broader legal and strategic implications, one-hour video.
BBC reporting on divisions within the Taliban leadership.
Richard Hanania, White Woman as Race Traitors.
Ethan Mollick asks Claude to design a very werid game. (Twitter/X)
And from Anthropic, an analysis of the personality of the Assistant, which is what most people interact with. (Twitter/X, paper)
An argument that pursuing status is actually a good idea, because status either is or represents something of real value.
Four academics discuss "viewpoint diversity" in the university: good idea, or cover for a right-wing putsch?
Remembering China's last conquest of Taiwan, in 1683, which also took place in the aftermath of an inconclusive civil war.
People are leaving New Zealand, more than one percent in just the past year. A majority go to Australia, often in search of better pay and job prospects. (NY Times) The GDP is also falling.
Tyler Cowen interviews Diarmaid MacCullough about Christianity, its history, the Reformation, and more, very interesting.
New Japanese minimalist house, stark but impressive.
Pioneering tourists at the battlefield of Waterloo. And the tourists who came to Johnstown to see the aftermath of the famous flood.
Contested American citizenship in 1784: the "Longchamps Affiar".
Matthew Yglesias, The Shocking Collapse of American Vaccination. A good example of what happens when the elite stops pushing back against a common prejudice.
US murder rates falls to lowest level since 1900. I guess that's one good thing about these soft, wimpy kids who refuse to grow up ;-)
Congress pumps new life into the Navy's 6th-generation fighter program, FA-XX, to the tune of $900 million. The White House budget had cut this program by 90%. Budget analysts say we can't afford two separate 6th-gen fighter programs (the Air Force has the F-47), but the Navy says a longer-range stealth fighter is a must-have.
Diarmaid-MacCulloch on Henry VIII:
Trouble about that is that a man like Henry VIII is a narcissist. I think we may have seen some in modern politics. The thing about narcissists is that they make good people do bad things. Henry VIII was talented at making good people, such as Cranmer and, I would say, Thomas Cromwell, do bad things.
It is practically impossible to describe Niels Bohr to a person who has never worked with him. Probably his most characteristic property was the slowness of his thinking and comprehension. When, in the late twenties and early thirties, the author of this book was one of the “Bohr boys” working in his Institute in Copenhagen on a Carlsberg (the best beer in the world!) fellowship, he had many a chance to observe it. In the evening, when a handful of Bohr’s students were “working” in the Paa Blegdamsvejen Institute, discussing the latest problems of the quantum theory, or playing Ping-pong on the library table with coffee cups placed on it to make the game more difficult, Bohr would appear, complaining that he was very tired, and would like to “do something.” To “do something” inevitably meant to go to the movies, and the only movies Bohr liked were those called The Gun Fight at the Lazy Gee Ranch or The Lone Ranger and a Sioux Girl. But it was hard to go with Bohr to the movies. He could not follow the plot, and was constantly asking us, to the great annoyance of the. rest of the audience, questions like this: “Is that the sister of that cowboy who shot the Indian who tried to steal a herd of cattle belonging to her brother-in-law?” The same slowness of reaction was apparent at scientific meetings. Many a time, a visiting young physicist (most physicists visiting Copenhagen were young) would deliver a brilliant talk about his recent calculations on some intricate problem of the quantum theory. Everybody in the audience would understand the argument quite clearly, but Bohr wouldn’t. So everybody would start to explain to Bohr the simple point he had missed, and in the resulting turmoil everybody would stop understanding anything. Finally, after a considerable period of time, Bohr would begin to understand, and it would turn out that what he understood about the problem presented by the visitor was quite different from what the visitor meant, and was correct, while the visitor’s interpretation was wrong.
– George Gamow
