Earth by Night

France and England, with the Aurora Borealis off to the north. Click to enlarge. From the International Space Station. More here.

No Rapture Yet

My son Robert (left) and two of his friends set out yesterday evening to celebrate the non-apocalypse by carrying these signs around Catonsville and waving to passers by.

In Saudi Arabia, a Simple Kind of Protest

In the world capital of legalized sexism, a place where women

are not allowed to drive and must have written approval from a designated guardian -- a father, husband, brother or son -- to leave the country, work or travel abroad.

A small group of women have started protesting by simply doing the things that the law forbids:

Saudi authorities arrested a female activist on Sunday who launched a campaign to challenge a ban on women driving in the conservative kingdom and posted a video on the Internet of her driving, activists said. The YouTube video, posted on Thursday, has attracted more than 500,000 views and shows Manal Alsharif, who learned to drive in the United States, driving her car in Khobar in the oil-producing Eastern Province.

One day the oil-fueled alliance between the United States and the Saudi royal family is going to collapse.

Robert Montgomery's Sign Poetry

More here.

Roses and Peonies

Today.

The Nebra Disk

One of the weirdest things to ever be excavated from an archaeological site is this bronze disk. Found in Germany in about 1999, it measures 30 centimeters (about a foot) across. It appeared on the antiquities market in rather mysterious circumstances, and since it does not really resemble any other object ever found in Europe, many people (including me) suspected it was a fraud. But the discoverers came forward with a plausible story about how and where it was found, on a low hill near the town of Nebra that has turned out to be a center of prehistoric astronomy, and they also produced two Bronze Age swords they said were found with it. One of these was radiocarbon dated to 1600 BC, which matches their style. The disk was seized by the government of Saxony-Anhalt and handed over to experts who examined it with the most minute and exacting German Wissenschaft. They verified that it was made in the Bronze Age, and also discovered many other things about it. It is one of the most fascinating objects in the world, and discussion of what it was and how it was used will go on for decades.

It was made in three stages. In the first, it bore only the small dots, the sun, and the moon, rendered in gold foil. The small dots are almost certainly stars, and the group of seven must be the Pleiades. Then the two gold arcs on the rim (one is missing) were added. These measure about 82 degrees, which is the angle between the midwinter and midsummer sunrises at the latitude of Nebra. Then the arc was added to the bottom; this has been interpreted as a solar boat, a rainbow, and the Milky Way, and it does not really seem to be related to the disk's function. The holes around the edge were punched still later, possibly when its original use had been forgotten.

What was that function? Here is where things get interesting. The sort of fringe elements who spend their spare time drawing solar alignments have had a field day with the disk, but I don't want to dismiss their speculations. After all, this is a unique object, and if we know anything about the European Bronze Age it's that the people were kind of mad for religious astronomy.

One interpretation is that the disk is a calculator for determining when to add the extra, intercalary month to the year. Ancient peoples had two main ways of measuring time, by solar years and lunar months. Twelve lunar months is only 354 days, so about every third year an extra month had to be added to the calendar. (Representing as it did the mismatch between the solar and lunar calendars and therefore the imperfection of the universe, this month was considered unlucky by many, and this is why 13 is an unlucky number.) Babylonian astronomical tablets describe a method of determining when to add the extra month that depends on the position of the sun, the moon, and the Pleiades. I have my doubts as whether the disk is rendered with enough precision to actually calculate anything, but it certainly seems to represent the elements used in the calculation.

Another interpretation is that it encodes the exact position of stars and planets at a solar eclipse of 1699 BC (see above). And no doubt there will be others, given the strangeness of this disk, and the well documented Bronze Age obsession with the sky.

After the Apocalypse

The other day, smirking over the latest prediction of the world's end, I had a sudden thought --what if it really happens? I felt a sort of vertigo, as I imagined how it would feel to realize that Harold Camping had been right, and the earth was crumbling around me. That lasted about two seconds. Then I was back to smirking.

Aside from a few good jokes about post-Rapture looting, the first positive thing to come out of this nonsense was the appearance of some real Christians at apocalypse central in Oakland:

“They are going to be reeling,” said Pastor Jacob Denys of Calvary Bible Church in nearby Milpitas, so he and about 20 volunteers planned to spend Saturday outside Mr. Camping’s compound to let “them to know that God still loves them.”

Thank you, Pastor Denys, for understanding that to believers this is not a joke, and tomorrow is going to be a very bleak day for them. Instead of gloating, perhaps the rest of us could mark the day by doing some act of kindness to our fellow earth-bound humans. After all, God is not coming in a cloud of glory to smite the wicked and reward the just. It's up to us, in our little human way, to make things better as we can.

Disconnections in the Arab Spring

In the New Left Review, Perry Anderson observes the disconnection between the stated goals of the rebellious Arab crowds and the social forces that seem to be behind the revolt. The goal of the protesters has been, in every case, democracy:

In place of the local despotism, what the huge crowds in squares and streets across the region are seeking is essentially political freedom. Democracy, no novelty as a term—virtually every regime made ample use of it—but unknown as a reality, has become a common denominator of the consciousness of the various national movements. Seldom articulated as a definite set of institutional forms, its attractive force has come more from its power as a negation of the status quo—as everything dictatorship is not—than from positive delineations of it. Punishment of corruption in the top ranks of the old regime figures more prominently than particulars of the constitution to come after it. The dynamic of the uprisings has been no less clear-cut for that. Their objective is, in the most classical of senses, purely political: liberty.

And yet, Anderson observes, Arabs have had the same political problem for decades. Why is the revolt happening now?-

The single spark that started the prairie fire suggests the answer. Everything began with the death in despair of a pauperized vegetable vendor, in a small provincial town in the hinterland of Tunisia. Beneath the commotion now shaking the Arab world have been volcanic social pressures: polarization of incomes, rising food prices, lack of dwellings, massive unemployment of educated—and uneducated—youth, amid a demographic pyramid without parallel in the world. In few other regions is the underlying crisis of society so acute, nor the lack of any credible model of development, capable of integrating new generations, so plain.

Yet to date, between the deeper social springs and the political aims of the Arab revolt there has been an all but complete disjuncture.

I see the same disconnection, and it worries me. It worries me because democracy will not lead in any simple or quick way to better jobs. Even if, as many of the protesters believe, their nations are being held back economically by entrenched corruption, the short-term impact of dismantling state enterprises and breaking up monopolies will be disruption and lost jobs. Will ordinary Egyptians lose faith in democracy if it takes (as is likely) a decade or more for the new regime to deliver better lives? Will political freedom compensate for economic turmoil?

Today's Cathedral

Angouleme, France.

That Weird Election in New York

There is a special election under way in upstate New York's 26th congressional district that conveys some important things about America right now. This is a heavily Republican area, easily won by John McCain in 2008. But this election is competitive, with the latest polls showing the Democrat, Kathy Hochul, ahead by less than the margin of error. Why? Two reasons. The main one is that the Republicans in the House passed the Ryan budget, which calls for drastic cuts to Medicaid and an end to Medicare as a guaranteed government benefit. By constantly harping on this plan to "end Medicare," Hochul has made the race competitive.

How has Republican Jane Corwin responded? Not, you can be sure, by defending the need to cut health care spending. No, she is running ads accusing the Democrats of cutting Medicare. This is leading to a weird argument that goes something like, "You want to cut Medicare!" "No I don't. You're the one who wants to cut Medicare!" "Oh yeah? "Yeah!"

In the abstract, in Washington, Republicans talk on and on about cutting spending. But the reality is that right now they can't win elections without winning a majority of voters over 65, and older Americans love Medicare. Republicans face a real problem here: their activists and money men are demanding major budget cuts, but the country's real, long-term fiscal problem is how to pay for old people's health care. Paul Ryan's budget solves that problem by drastically limiting the health care old people will get. But old people like having good health care, and they are in no mood to give it up. If Democrats can convince older voters that Republicans want to take their Medicare away, they may abandon the Republicans by the millions and catapult the Democrats back into the Congressional majority they enjoyed for a generation before 1994.

Then there is the second problem for Republican Corwin: Tea Party candidate Jack Davis. Davis has run for office before as both a Democrat and a Republican, and this time his platform consists mainly of being angrier than anyone else. The surge of right-wing anger in America is another real danger for the Republicans, since it may lead to more three-way races or more primaries in which Sharon Angles knock off more mainstream candidates.

Meanwhile, in the department of forgetting: Jack Davis is especially angry about unemployment and lost jobs, which he blames on high taxes. So he is running ads that play on the plight of the unemployed, like this one in which a woman, told that her husband has been laid off, asks, "How can we pay for my chemotherapy without health insurance?" Hey, you know, the President has an answer to that question! It's called the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. By 2014 it will be providing big subsidies to people in exactly that situation, so they can keep their health insurance. Isn't it cool when problems actually have solutions?

The Adventures of Augie March

I just finished listening to The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow, and it has vaulted onto the short list of my favorite books. I loved it. Augie March is a fatherless Jewish kid who grows up in Chicago in the 1920s, lives through the Depression and World War II, has a few adventures and meets lots of people. There is a plot but it doesn't matter much. The wonder of it is the people; most of the book is a series of character sketches and vignettes. Augie is not a very strong character, and other people keep recruiting him into their schemes. He goes along with their projects, but only so far. Since he never really signs on, he is involved enough to know the story but distant enough to tell it dispassionately. The parade of people and lives is astonishing, every sort of character from crooks, cops and the Polish milkman to a paraplegic real estate tycoon, an Armenian lawyer who holds court in a Turkish bath on the 45th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper, and an heiress who trains eagles to hunt giant iguanas. All are convincing and most are fascinating. Because of the unending stream of characters and stories, the book never drags even when it is most intellectual. No one but Augie hangs around long enough to get boring, and since he is always getting involved in new schemes and meeting new people, he is never boring, either. I think this is the most consistently entertaining highbrow novel I have ever read.

The first part of the book is the best. Set in a Chicago neighborhood of Jewish and Polish immigrants much like the one where Bellow himself spent his teenage years, it is a brilliant re-imagining of a time and place. It is real enough to be believable but probably ten times as interesting as any such place ever was. It lives and breathes and dances off the page. It reminded me a lot of those Yiddish writers from the early twentieth century who celebrated life in Jewish towns and neighborhoods. So I checked Bellow's biography, and sure enough he translated one of those books, Isaac Bashevis Singer's Gimpel the Fool, at the same time he was writing Augie March (1953). Bellow is better, though -- he had more range and less sentimentality, and at least in English he was a much better crafter of sentences.

The biggest complaint some people have about the book is the confusing quality of the narration. It's a first-person story, and Augie's voice is a mix of Chicago wise-guy and academic philosopher. He spent much of his adolescence hanging around a South Side pool hall frequented by small time crooks, and he knows their lingo and their concerns, but when he describes them he brings up Odysseus, Aristotle, Alfred the Great, Cromwell, Baudelaire, Freud, physics, and on and on. Ron Rosembaum complained of Bellow, "there's the street-wise Windy City wiseguy and then-as if to show off that the wiseguy has Wisdom-there are the undigested chunks of arcane, not entirely impressive, philosophic thought and speculation. Just to make sure you know his novels have intellectual heft." The dissonance was probably made a little worse for me by Tom Parker's wonderful reading, since he gives Augie March a perfect Chicago wise guy voice.

I got used to this, though, and it didn't bother me. After all, Saul Bellow had a career something like Augie March's, rising from Chicago's immigrant neighborhoods to the intellectual elite. Yes, it is improbable that anyone could meet as many fascinating people as Augie March, or have so many deep conversations with near strangers, or think such intellectual thoughts in a pool hall, but it is a novel. And a really great one.

This is the first work I have read from Bellow's early period. Compared to his later novels it is perhaps rougher, less well structured, and less thematically coherent. But it explodes with life in a raw way that more than makes up for its formal shortcomings, and it lacks the sometimes dreary condescension of the later books. Augie March is much less judgmental than Bellow's later narrators. He is the perfect companion, tolerating everyone, and if he sees people's faults he also understands their sorrows and admires their victories. Sometimes he gets angry and hurls abuse, but always he is as much in the wrong as the object of his anger. His view of women has something in common with Bellow's mature distaste -- for example, he meets at least two women who are obsessed with love and focus so much energy on it that they have little left for politics or intellectual life. But on the whole the women in this book are as diverse and vital as the men.

I think The Adventures of Augie March is the best American novel I have ever read.

Obama on the Middle East

The President, today:

Our opposition to Iran's intolerance - as well as its illicit nuclear program, and its sponsorship of terror - is well known. But if America is to be credible, we must acknowledge that our friends in the region have not all reacted to the demands for change consistent with the principles that I have outlined today. That is true in Yemen, where President Saleh needs to follow through on his commitment to transfer power. And that is true, today, in Bahrain.

Bahrain is a long-standing partner, and we are committed to its security. We recognise that Iran has tried to take advantage of the turmoil there, and that the Bahraini government has a legitimate interest in the rule of law. Nevertheless, we have insisted publicly and privately that mass arrests and brute force are at odds with the universal rights of Bahrain's citizens, and will not make legitimate calls for reform go away. The only way forward is for the government and opposition to engage in a dialogue, and you can't have a real dialogue when parts of the peaceful opposition are in jail. The government must create the conditions for dialogue, and the opposition must participate to forge a just future for all Bahrainis.

Indeed, one of the broader lessons to be drawn from this period is that sectarian divides need not lead to conflict. In Iraq, we see the promise of a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian democracy. There, the Iraqi people have rejected the perils of political violence for a democratic process, even as they have taken full responsibility for their own security. Like all new democracies, they will face setbacks. But Iraq is poised to play a key role in the region if it continues its peaceful progress. As they do, we will be proud to stand with them as a steadfast partner.

Nice to see the President whacking the oppressors in Bahrain. But I wonder if it is really a great idea to hold up Iraq, where political violence takes a hundred lives a month, as a model of multi-sect democracy.

Göbekli Tepe

National Geographic has an excellent article on the fascinating site of Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey, the oldest known temple, along with a wonderful photo essay by Vincent J. Musi. The site is highly complex and includes at least 20 rings of monumental stones, some of them elaborately carved, built one on top of the other over the period between 9600 and 8200 BC. Klaus Schmidt, who directs the excavations, argues that they show the first human settlements owed more to religious feeling than economic change:

Archaeologists are still excavating Göbekli Tepe and debating its meaning. What they do know is that the site is the most significant in a volley of unexpected findings that have overturned earlier ideas about our species' deep past. Just 20 years ago most researchers believed they knew the time, place, and rough sequence of the Neolithic Revolution—the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and from there to technologically sophisticated societies with great temples and towers and kings and priests who directed the labor of their subjects and recorded their feats in written form. But in recent years multiple new discoveries, Göbekli Tepe preeminent among them, have begun forcing archaeologists to reconsider.

At first the Neolithic Revolution was viewed as a single event—a sudden flash of genius—that occurred in a single location, Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now southern Iraq, then spread to India, Europe, and beyond. Most archaeologists believed this sudden blossoming of civilization was driven largely by environmental changes: a gradual warming as the Ice Age ended that allowed some people to begin cultivating plants and herding animals in abundance. The new research suggests that the "revolution" was actually carried out by many hands across a huge area and over thousands of years. And it may have been driven not by the environment but by something else entirely.

Before Klaus Schmidt, the idea that religion, not economics, drove the formation of the first towns was associated mainly with Ian Hodder, currently directing excavations at the famous site of Çatalhöyük. Hodder has long argued that rather than inventing agriculture and then settling down, humans settled down and then invented agriculture to feed their newly stable communities. To Hodder, we came together first to worship and only later to trade. This new archaeology shifts the focus away from charred seeds and goat bones to the interpretation of art. Fortunately there is much wonderful neolithic art to think about, things like the stone human head from Nevalı Çori (above), which sports a snake on top, and the vultures of Çatalhöyük.

I personally think the debate over what came first is a bit overblown. What the archaeology tells us is that human life always has a powerful symbolic and spiritual dimension, and that we have long been very creative about the kinds of settlements we live in and the ways we find to keep ourselves alive.

The Rock Carvings of Pakistan

People have been carving things on rock for a long time, for many different reasons. In one part of Pakistan, which has been intensely explored because it may soon disappear under the waters of a dam, carvings illustrate the art of the region from early Neolithic times (above) to the Bronze Age (below) to the heyday of Buddhism in the 1st millennium AD (bottom).

Lonely Planets

There may be more starless planets in the Milky Way than there are stars. Using a new planet detection technology known as micro-lensing, astronomers have detected Jupiter-sized planets too far from stars to be part of ordinary solar systems:

The new work was done using a method known as gravitational microlensing, which is more sensitive to planets farther out. It relies on the ability of the gravitational field of a massive object — in this case a planet and its star — to bend light and act as a magnifying lens, as predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Astronomers from two groups — Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics, based in New Zealand and Japan, and the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, based in Poland and Chile — monitor the light from a vast field of background stars, looking for brief blips of increased brightness caused by a planet and its host star passing in the foreground.

The group recorded 10 such events consistent with being caused by planet-size objects but did not detect the corresponding blips from these planets’ host stars, suggesting either that they did not belong to any star, having been ejected by gravitational pinball games earlier in their lives, or that they were very distant.

The notion of a dark planet far from any star sounds like a story to me, perhaps a story of astronauts journeying to a giant planet somewhere between earth and the nearest star and finding moons with the frozen remnants of an alien outpost.

We Are Our Germs

This sort of thing sets me thinking:

For the first time, researchers at McMaster University have conclusive evidence that bacteria residing in the gut influence brain chemistry and behaviour.

The findings are important because several common types of gastrointestinal disease, including irritable bowel syndrome, are frequently associated with anxiety or depression. In addition there has been speculation that some psychiatric disorders, such as late onset autism, may be associated with an abnormal bacterial content in the gut. "The exciting results provide stimulus for further investigating a microbial component to the causation of behavioural illnesses," said Stephen Collins . . . .

For each person, the gut is home to about 1,000 trillion bacteria with which we live in harmony. These bacteria perform a number of functions vital to health: They harvest energy from the diet, protect against infections and provide nutrition to cells in the gut. Any disruption can result in life-threatening conditions, such as antibiotic-induced colitis from infection with the "superbug" Clostridium difficile.

Working with healthy adult mice, the researchers showed that disrupting the normal bacterial content of the gut with antibiotics produced changes in behaviour; the mice became less cautious or anxious. This change was accompanied by an increase in brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which has been linked, to depression and anxiety.

When oral antibiotics were discontinued, bacteria in the gut returned to normal. "This was accompanied by restoration of normal behaviour and brain chemistry," Collins said.

What if part of our personality is determined by the bacteria that live inside us? What if different bacteria would change who we are? What if there are differences between the bacteria that inhabit different human communities, causing certain groups of people to be, on average, more or less anxious, or more or less energetic? What if different diets change our bacteria, and therefore our personalities?

Monument of the Day

Standing Stones of Callanish, Isle of Lewis, Scotland

Thought for the Day

Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?

--Abraham Lincoln

Rick Santorum's Evil Fantasies

Rick Santorum's presidential campaign stumbles along from one low point to another, but none has matched his nonsensical statements on how we caught Osama bin Laden. Most of the commentary has focused on his statement that former POW John McCain "doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation works." Since John McCain is probably the only member of the US Congress who understands how torture works, let's quote him on the subject:

Once my condition had stabilized, my interrogators resumed their work. Demands for military information were accompanied by threats to terminate my medical treatment if I did not cooperate. Eventually, I gave them my ship’s name and squadron number, and confirmed that my target had been the power plant. Pressed for more useful information, I gave the names of the Green Bay Packers offensive line, and said they were members of my squadron. When asked to identify future targets, I simply recited the names of a number of North Vietnamese cities that had already been bombed.

I was occasionally beaten when I declined to give any more information. . . .

Over a four day period McCain was beaten "every three or four hours," and yet he still, like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, continued to offer false or useless information.

Rick Santorum, however, clings to the wrong in every sense notion of "breaking" the interrogation subject that I already wrote about:

I mean, you break somebody, and after they’re broken, they become cooperative.

No, you don't, and they don't. "Breaking" is a fantasy of power, not an interrogation technique. Santorum is only expressing a primitive longing to crush the will of our enemies and render them tools in our hands.

Santorum is a conservative Catholic, and yet on the subject of torture he continues to make statement after statement completely at odds with his Church. Modern Catholic teaching on this subject is clear: "torture is never permissible, even for the gravest reasons." Whatever else you may think of the current Pope, he is at least clear on this one: "The prohibition against torture cannot be contravened under any circumstances." Nor is the church going to accept any of this "enhanced interrogation" nonsense, since their prohibition on torture covers anything that would "undermine or debase the dignity of the prisoner."

I wonder if any bishop will move to deny Santorum communion?

Stealth Drones and Politics

Sometimes news stories interest me not because of their subject matter, but because they make me wonder why they are in the news just now. Consider this report from the Washington Post:

The CIA employed sophisticated new stealth drone aircraft to fly dozens of secret missions deep into Pakistani airspace and monitor the compound where Osama bin Laden was killed, current and former U.S. officials said.

Using unmanned planes designed to evade radar detection and operate at high altitudes, the agency conducted clandestine flights over the compound for months before the May 2 assault in an effort to capture high-resolution video that satellites could not provide.

The aircraft allowed the CIA to glide undetected beyond the boundaries that Pakistan has long imposed on other U.S. drones, including the Predators and Reapers that routinely carry out strikes against militants near the border with Afghanistan.

Why, do you suppose, are "current U.S. officials" suddenly so chatty about the capabilities of our secret stealth drone program? Are they razzing Pakistan about what we can do without their even knowing about it? Trying to scare terrorists? Angling for more funding? Are the drone guys and the satellite guys engaged in some kind of power struggle? Weird.

Freedom in the Swamp

Archaeologist Dan Sayers has been working in the Great Dismal Swamp of southeastern Virginia for ten years now, trying to document the settlements of maroons -- runaway slaves -- that some historians think lived in the hidden recesses of the swamp. Past Horizons has a story on his work that has the same characteristics as everything else I have read about this project: tantalizing hints of discovery but no actual data. I hope he is saving up his results for a big publication, because I am starting to think that the years of silence mean little or nothing has actually been found. This is not really a dig at Sayers but a problem with trying to study certain kinds of people through archaeology. What, do you suppose, would a runaway slave living in a swamp actually own? What traces would a camp of such people leave behind? And how would you distinguish their camps from those of other people who might have been in the swamp?

Aside from maroons, Sayers says the swamp was also home to Indigenous Americans (Native Americans), enslaved canal labourers (African-Americans who worked for the canal companies—some worked to buy or earn their freedom), free African-Americans, and outcast Europeans, such as criminals.

This must be from historical documents, since even in principle it would be difficult to make such identifications from archaeology. What Sayers admits to having found certainly doesn't amount to much:

Sayers says the items unearthed during the past decade have been mundane, everyday items—such as part of a broken bowl, a gunflint, a stone tool, or bone fragments of a butchered animal—but they help tell the story of the people who lived there and how they interacted with each other and the outside world.

Sad to say, some of the people we would most like to learn about archaeologically -- because they are not well documented in written records, or because they lived outside the main currents of society -- left very little behind for us to study. I have been on my own quest for the past decade to learn more about the residents of the colonial frontier, and so far most of what I have learned is negative: they did not own much in the way of ceramics or glass, their houses were built without nails or window glass, they did not dig wells, and they did not stay in place for very long.

In the case of possible maroon communities in the swamp, the historical record is also clouded by legend-making. The notion of such slave hide-outs was fascinating to Americans -- grimly so to most Southerners, Romantically to northern abolitionists --which is why there are several paintings and numerous engravings of the subject. (The one above is by Thomas Moran.) Claims of large maroon communities in the swamp ring more of horror or triumphalism than observed fact. But then, if such communities existed they must have been very well hidden indeed, because otherwise the Virginia militia would have wiped them out.

Hence the lure of archaeology to find out how much truth lies behind these reports. I wish the explorers luck, but I have to say that I am not really expecting major discoveries.

Alberto del Pozo's Santeria Pantheon

Cuban born artist Alberto del Pozo created these lithographs of the Santeria gods in the 1980s. Above is Ogun, the blacksmith god of metal and war. His symbols include the machete and a three-footed iron pot containing nine or 21 metal objects.

Orula, also known as Ifa, is the lord of time and divination.

Echú Eleguá is the messenger of the gods, lord of crossroads, gatekeeper of heaven; he is invoked first in any Santeria ceremony.

Yemayá is the queen of waters and mother of the gods.

Yewa is the queen of death, and she lives in cemeteries.

Click on the images to enlarge. These are from BibliOdyssey.

Today's Castle

Dolwyddelan Castle, North Wales.

Morgellons, Again

People who think their illnesses are being ignored by their doctors seem to have a lot of political clout in America. They complain to their Congressmen, who put earmarks in the health funding bills demanding studies. Here's another, this one of people who have been diagnosed with "delusional skin infestation." People with this condition

steadfastly yet mistakenly believe that pathogens are infesting their skin. Sometimes, patients believe their skin is literally crawling with bugs, worms, or germs, which is also known as "delusions of parasitosis." In other cases, patients perceive that inanimate objects such as wood chips, fibers, or little tubes are involved.

If you think fibers are growing under your skin, that's the variant called "Morgellon's Disease." I might note that nobody who thinks his skin is "crawling with germs" is delusional, since all of our skin is crawling with germs; it's just that very few of those germs make you sick.

In this latest study, samples submitted by patients and samples from biopsies performed by medical technicians were both analyzed, and none showed evidence of parasites or other extrasomatic issues.

This is not to say, you know, that these people are not sick. Some of them have scratched their skin into a terrible state -- I read about one woman who scratched all the way through her skull and actually scratched her brain -- and really few things are more miserable than maddening itching. But for many people with constant itching, the problem is in their brains. For some reason people find this insulting, but your brain is a big mass of tissue that can have all sorts of things go wrong with it.

War and Politics

General Willam DePuy, one of the more thoughtful of modern American officers, offered as one of the lessons of the Vietnam War that we should never start wars that may stretch across two Presidential administrations:

Prudent military planners should draw the obvious conclusion that operations which span two administrations may lose their support in midstream. Very short operations like Grenada are about perfect. Long inconclusive operations like Vietnam are now known to be doomed. We may take this to be a legitimate consideration in connection with the doctrine governing operational art. It is a political refinement which is no less organic to the problem.

That Comet Theory

From Rex Dalton at Miller-McCune:

It seemed like such an elegant answer to an age-old mystery: the disappearance of what are arguably North America’s first people. A speeding comet nearly 13,000 years ago was the culprit, the theory goes, spraying ice and rocks across the continent, killing the Clovis people and the mammoths they fed on, and plunging the region into a deep chill. The idea so captivated the public that three movies describing the catastrophe were produced.

But now, four years after the purportedly supportive evidence was reported, a host of scientific authorities systematically have made the case that the comet theory is “bogus.” Researchers from multiple scientific fields are calling the theory one of the most misguided ideas in the history of modern archaeology, which begs for an independent review so an accurate record is reflected in the literature.

The comet impact theory was intriguing partly because it depended on so much new science: "carbon spherules" and "nano-diamonds" as evidence of an impact, mathematical modeling of what would happen if a comet hit an ice sheet, and so on. Faced with such a barrage of ideas, many archaeologists reacted as I did, with cautious interest.

Alas, it now seems that many of the "nano-diamonds" are nothing of the kind, that "carbon spherules" are omnipresent in some soils, and the original investigators' dating of their soil sequences was off by a thousand years. Not to mention that one of the authors of the original paper, who signed himself Allen West, is actually Allen Whitt, who was convicted of fraud in 2002 after charging California towns thousands of dollars for bogus water studies. It was this mysterious figure who collected much of the original data, and now his work is pretty much dismissed by everyone involved. Except, as Dalton notes, the other two authors of the original paper. Marine geologist James Kennett and physicist Richard Firestone are sticking to their guns. Maybe they see something nobody else can, but it seems that they have just got their backs up to the wall:

Such intransigence has been seen before in other cases of grand scientific claims. Sometimes those theories were based on data irregularities. Other times, the proponents succumbed to self-delusion. But typically, advocates become so invested in their ideas they can’t publicly acknowledge error. . . . all of these phenomena may be in play, apparently creating a peculiar bond of desperation as the theory comes under increasing attack.

It is very hard to say, "I was wrong."

Bomere Pool

In the days of the Roman empire, when Uriconium was standing, a very wicked city stood where we now see Bomere Pool. The inhabitants had turned back from Christianity to heathenism, and though God sent one of the Roman soldiers to be a prophet to them, like Jonah to Nineveh, they would not repent. Far from that, they ill-used and persecuted the preacher.

Only the daughter of the governor remained constant to the faith. She listened gladly to the Christian's teaching, and he on his part loved her, and would have had her to be his wife. But no such happy lot was in store for the faithful pair. On the following Easter eve, sudden destruction came upon the city. The distant Caradoc [a hill] sent forth flames of fire, and at the same time the city was overwhelmed by a tremendous flood, while the sun in the heavens danced for joy, and the cattle in the stalls knelt in thanksgiving that God had not permitted such wickedness to go unpunished.

But the Christian warrior was saved from the flood, and he took a boat and rowed over the waters, seeking for his betrothed, but all in vain. His boat was overturned, and he too was drowned in the depths of the mere. Yet whenever Easter eve falls on the same day as it did that year, the form of the Roman warrior may be seen again, rowing across Bomere in search of his lost love, while the church bells are heard ringing far in the depths below.

Charlotte S. Burne, Shropshire Folk-Lore: A Sheaf of Glearnings. 1883.

Why Do We Reason?

Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, "Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory," is being hailed as one of the most important psychological papers in years. The abstract:

Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow erroneous beliefs to persist. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: Look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and, ceteris paribus, favor conclusions for which arguments can be found.

A very interesting idea, but why does reasoning have to have one function? Certainly people often reason as a way of arguing rather than to a way of getting to the truth, but sometimes they also use reason to solve problems, impress potential mates, and so on. Perhaps "argumentative reasoning" is not really a primary ability of our brains, but a sort of fusion of problem solving and language.

Witch Hunts in Iran

Things are getting weird in Iran:

Close allies of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have been accused of using supernatural powers to further his policies amid an increasingly bitter power struggle between him and the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being "magicians" and invoking djinns (spirits). Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as "a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds".

The arrests come amid a growing rift between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei which has prompted several MPs to call for the president to be impeached.

Part of the reason for the breach is a dispute between the President and the Supreme Leader over the Hidden Imam:

the feud has taken a metaphysical turn following the release of an Iranian documentary alleging the imminent return of the Hidden Imam Mahdi – the revered saviour of Shia Islam, whose reappearance is anticipated by believers in a manner comparable to that with which Christian fundamentalists anticipate the second coming of Jesus.

Conservative clerics, who say that the Mahdi's return cannot be predicted, have accused a "deviant current" within the president's inner circle, including Mashaei, of being responsible for the film.

Ahmadinejad's obsession with the hidden imam is well known. He often refers to him in his speeches and in 2009 said that he had documentary evidence that the US was trying to prevent Mahdi's return.

One problem with trying to base a political order on religious fundamentalism is that strong believers often disagree violently about the details of their faiths, and fundamentalist states are thus vulnerable to schism.

UPDATE

It occurs to me that what I most aspire to be is "a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds".

Libertarians and "Slavery"

Rand Paul and his father Ron have both been in the news lately for arguing that democratic government is (or can lead to) slavery. Here is Rand, speaking in a Senate subcommittee meeting on health care:

With regard to the idea whether or not you have a right to health care you have to realize what that implies. I am a physician. You have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. You are going to enslave not only me but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants, the nurses. … You are basically saying you believe in slavery.

Ron's argument was a little more nuanced. What he said was, first, that Social Security and Medicare are un-Constitutional, and then, when it was pointed out that the courts have consistently ruled for decades that they are constitutional, he responded, "And the Constitution and the courts said slavery was legal to, and we had to reverse that." So while he did not say that Social Security is slavery, he certainly put it in the category of very bad things we ought to oppose because they limit freedom.

Libertarians are highly prone to this sort of nonsensical thinking. The error is in extending political arguments to their logical extreme instead of looking around you to see what the world is like. Slavery, the argument goes, consists in the theft of another person's labor, so when you tax me without my consent, you are stealing my labor and therefore enslaving me. If you pass a law that says doctors must accept a certain level of payment for their services -- Medicare and Medicaid both do this -- you are stealing their labor and therefore enslaving them. It is hard to refute this thinking logically.

But look around you! Do American doctors look like slaves to you? Do they feel like slaves?

The notion that the status of wealthy doctors in contemporary America is somehow like the status of slaves is crazy -- except, of course, in the ways that all humans are pretty much the same, and to which politics are irrelevant. This tells you that slavery is not just the theft of someone else's labor, or else that taxation and regulation are not theft. (Or both, which I believe.) The reality is that we are all vastly more wealthy than we would be otherwise because we live in the modern world. Only part, and a very small part, of the money we earn comes from our own labor; the rest comes from our participation in the modern economy. The modern world depends on a vast infrastructure of technology, law, bureaucracy, and so on, that we could not create on our own and that could not exist without a certain level of coercion. Taxation does not make us poorer; big government is a key part of the modern way of life, and that modern way makes us richer.

Democratic government, likewise, has certain very high costs associated with it. But no other system has anything like the same record of delivering wealth and stability. Things like old age pensions and health care for poor people are part of what we do to keep the social peace and make our society a nice one to live in. They cost a lot, but without them we would live in a much more divided, violent, ugly, and nasty world.

You may feel that the bargain is not worth it, and that we would be better off trading wealth for freedom and living in a more anarchical society. Fine -- go park your trailer in the desert somewhere. But don't tell me that a modern person who has to pay taxes is anything like a slave.