Curiosity Going to Gale Crater

NASA has just announced the destination of the next Mars rover, Curiosity. The chosen landing site is in a large crater named Gale, 96 miles (154 kilometers) in diameter. In the center of the crater is a large mountain.

Curiosity is a much larger vehicle than previous rovers, and it is nuclear powered.

This is the landing site, near to what look like layered deposits at the foot of the mountain.

Close up of the layered deposits. Photo analysis suggests that some of these layers are sulfate-containing clays, which form in water. The idea is that by driving across this layered terrain the rover will be able to study rocks from different period of Mars' past. The mission is scheduled to launch late this year and land in August 2012.

Viktor Vasnetsov

Russian artist and illustrator, 1848-1926, much taken with mythological and religious themes. Above is Knight at the Crossroads, 1882.

The Flying Carpet, 1880.

Igor's Field (The Battlefield of Igor Svyatoslavich's fighting with the Polovtsy), 1880.

Gamayun the Prophetic Bird, 1897.

Detail from the Frog Princess, 1918.

Why Are Artists Crazy? Are Artists Crazy?

The death of Amy Winehouse set me musing on a topic I have been thinking about on and off all year, the connection between madness and art. I spent much of this spring immersed in old Irish and Norse literature, reading ancient lays about gods and heroes. In those traditions it is pretty much assumed that a poet will be a strange character, if not an actual madman roaming the woods in animal skins. Artistic creation in Old Europe was related to the shamanistic reveries of holy men. The poet sang what he had seen on journeys to the other world, or what was dictated to him by divine spirits, and openness to such visions was not part of normal life. Siberian shamans of modern times are notorious for their strange behavior -- cross dressing, speaking in riddles, eating strange foods, exploding in sudden bursts of anger or falling to the ground in fits. Their huts are often at some distance from the village, and in any case they spend much of their time alone. Poets who were part of this tradition had to be "inspired," that is, entered by a spirit, and that meant cultivating a lonely relationship to the spirit world.

Everyone can come up with a long list of artists who were pretty whacky, especially for modern times when we know a lot about them. I think this is an important point about people like Dickens; if we knew just the outlines of his career he would seem rather normal, and it is only the detailed record of his life that allows us to see his struggle with depression. We have no evidence that Shakespeare was crazy, but then we know hardly anything about him. Of course, this applies just as much to other kinds of people as to artists. What percentage of people in the nineteenth century were crazy as we understand it? When I read about Victorian slums, I see whole communities of mentally ill people treating their diseases with the only drug available, gin. Part of the reason we know so many artists were crazy is that we know so much about their lives and thoughts.

In recent times there have been several interesting studies relating creativity to mental illness, especially to bipolar disorder. One theory is that art springs from the artist's efforts to hold his or her troubled mind together. Art is thus a "force for consolidation" (Anthony Storr) in the mind. This explains to some extent the pattern of alteration in some artists' lives between episodes of mental illness and periods of creativity: the mad impulses are always there, but sometimes they can be tamed and sometimes they overwhelm the mind. Recent genetic studies also suggest links between creativity and mental illness. No genetic variants have yet been discovered that make everyone who has them schizophrenic, but there are variants that are more common in schizophrenics, and people who have these variants but are not visibly crazy score higher on tests of creativity.

I tend to think that since the belief that poets are madmen is at least 2000 years old and still going strong, there must be something to it. Just counting up artists who struggled with mental health issues can certainly be a depressing exercise. Or perhaps instead it should cheer us that so many people have transmuted their pain into our joy.

Tree House

This one is called Temple of the Blue Moon. More here.

Rural Virginia in 1863

From the memoirs of Sergeant Stearns of the 13th Massachusetts Volunteers. Haskell is on guard duty at a civilian house in Stafford County, 1863:

I used to go over to see Haskell, but never to eat. I recollect of being over there one afternoon and Haskell invited me into the house. I accepted, and as this is a good representation of a great majority of the poor white establishments, I will give it. The house was simply a log house about 15 feet square, containing one room with a door on either side; for a window there was a hole about two feet square with a sliding board in the inside to stop it up when needed. The fireplace and chimney were built on the outside of the house of sticks and mud in regular Virginia style. In one corner of the room on the opposite side from the fireplace stood the family bed. In the corner on the left of the fireplace stood a table, in the center of the room was a bench about four feet long, used for a seat, and there was two chairs without backs, or stools; I have forgotten which. When we entered Mr. Bullard sat on one, and Mrs. Bullard sat on the other, while the five children, the eldest a girl of fourteen, sat on the bench or floor. On being introduced Mr. Bullard arose, shook hands, and invited me to take a seat, offering at the same time his stool. Mrs. Bullard arose, courtesied, and resumed her seat. Declining with thanks Mr. Bullard’s offer of his seat, I said, “I would sit with Haskell on the bench.” We sat facing the fire; the children were scattered promiscuously around. I now noticed why Mrs. Bullard sat so near the fire; she was preparing a meal for them, and the pot was over the fire in which was their “pone cake”, also a frying pan in which, swimming its own fat, was the ever to be found “smoked sides.” On the hearth were two old tin cans (such as the boys had bought can fruit of the sutler in) in which she was making coffee. Mr. Bullard was chewing tobacco, and spitting into, or rather towards the fire, and as he sat some distance away, many were the times that he failed of his mark and there was stream between him and the fire. We entered into a general conversation, for he was quite an intelligent man and was very well informed in some things. Of course he knew nothing about the resources of the rebels, or their condition even, all this was mere speculation with him, but he could talk like a man who knew it all, and he had great confidence in the success of their cause and that they never would be conquered, but would gain all they wanted in the end. To my enquiry of where he based his opinion, he said “that the South would never submit to Yankee rule, they would never be conquered,” without giving any reasons. Not wishing to excite him too much, I refrained from talking any more about the war. Mrs Bullard, with the assistance of her daughter, had by this time set the table with two platters, or deep dishes, and poured the greasy contents of the frying pan into one, and placed the pone cake on the other, then announced that the meal was ready: Mr. Bullard arose and politely invited me to a seat at the table with him; I as politely declined, giving as my reason that I had just eaten as I had left camp. It was not often that we had a chance to sit at a table and we seldom refused, but the thought of the tobacco juice from Mr. Bullard’s mouth satisfied me, without knowingly partaken of it. Mr. Bullard then drew his stool up, and Mrs. Bullard turning on hers, the children standing around and seeking the most advantageous position. The meal was commenced by each one taking a piece of the cake and dipping it in the fat before eating it. They were not over careful about spilling the fat on the floor or on themselves. While they were at their meal Haskell and myself talked together. After eating everything that was cooked and drinking the coffee, the old man went back to his side of the fireplace, and, producing a dirty looking pipe filled it, and taking a coal from the hearth lighted it. After smoking away for a few moments he passed it to Mrs. Bullard, who, after indulging in a few sweetly pleasant puffs, passed it to the eldest daughter and son on down to the little younger that was hardly able to run alone.
After staying a few moments longer, I bade the family good night and went out with Haskell. I asked him if that was the way they lived, and he said it was, although they were a little on their good behavior.
I asked Haskell where they all slept as I saw but one bed, and I thought by the looks there was no great chamber accommodations; he said they all slept in that one bed. I asked him where he slept and he said on the floor before the fire.
I asked why the old man did not cut his hair and trim his whiskers, for he wore them very long and, by the looks, never combed. He said the old man told him he never shaved, only when he was lousey.

(Howard Musselman, The Civil War in Stafford County. H.E. Howard, Lynchburg, VA, 1995, pp. 37-38.)

Hemaris thysbe

This is the hummingbird clearwing moth, which survives in the daytime by mimicking the general appearance and motion of a bee. These are regular summer visitors in my garden. They don't ever sit still, though, so it is hard to get a picture of one.

Butterflies

One thing that loves the heat is butterflies, and the garden is alive with them.

Bats in the Tunnel

Photo by Jason Cane.

It's Hot

The temperature in Washington, DC right now: 102 F, or 39 C.

UPDATE: Official high in Baltimore yesterday was 106 F, or 41 C.

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

--W.B. Yeats

Fighting Lead with Fish Meal

Lead has been one of the worst ecological catastrophes of the industrial age, and the amount of lead in the soil of many old urban neighborhoods is still dangerous. Fortunately, scientists may have hit on an affordable way of dealing with the problem:

Today, there is more lead contamination in America’s cities than any federal or state agency could ever afford to clean up and haul away. So scientists and regulators are trying a new strategy, transforming the dangerous metal into a form the human body cannot absorb, thus vastly reducing the risk of lead poisoning.

The principle is straightforward, said Victor R. Johnson, an engineer with Civil & Environmental Consultants Inc. “The fish bones are full of calcium phosphate,” he said. “As they degrade, the phosphates migrate into the soil.” The lead in the soil, deposited by car exhaust from the decades when gasoline contained lead or from lead-based paint residue, binds with the phosphate and transforms into pyromorphite, a crystalline mineral that will not harm anyone even if consumed.

This alchemy has been practiced in university and commercial laboratories for more than 15 years, and more recently has been employed at acid-mine sites and military bases. But now it is also coming to residential neighborhoods like South Prescott in Oakland, which this month became the first in the country where fishbone meal is being mixed into the soil for lead control under a project organized by the Environmental Protection Agency.

“It’s fair to say, looking forward, that just about every urban residential area probably has a lead problem and we just can’t afford economically and socially to move that amount of dirt any more,” said Steve Calanog, the E.P.A. official in the San Francisco office that is overseeing the project. “Topsoil is a precious resource, and we don’t have enough topsoil to replace it.”

The project in South Prescott, expected to cover a six-block area and cost $4 million over two years, will train up to 75 workers, many previously unemployed, in toxic cleanup methods. In this 100-year-old neighborhood of west Oakland, the average contamination levels in the soil are twice the federal limit of 400 parts per million, and some hot spots have lead levels five or six times greater, Mr. Calanog said. South Prescott was built on landfills holding the detritus of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. . . .

When it came to fixing the problem, local E.P.A. officials consulted with community leaders. The fishbone approach appealed to everyone involved because no one liked the idea of the heavy construction associated with soil removal, or the idea of taking and dumping the toxic soil on another community, Mr. Calanog said.

The Shaolin Pagoda Forest

Tombs of eminent monks at the Shaolin Temple, China. National Geographic has an article and slide show about the situation of the temple in modern China here.

Gibbons are Less Endangered than We Thought

Biologists have identified a thriving population of more than 400 white-cheeked gibbons in a Vietnamese park. If this area can be protected, the species' chance of survival in the wild will go up a lot.

The Diversity of Baboon Culture

I am posting this story here mainly so I can find it again the next time one of these debates comes up. A certain sort of evolutionary determinist likes to argue that some things about human society cannot change, and in the course of this argument he or she is bound to cite some primate studies about chimpanzee mating or baboon aggression. But chimpanzees and baboons are not all alike. They have, in fact, highly diverse personalities. Chimpanzee and baboon troops are also quite diverse, often, it seems, because of the personalities of the dominant animals. In support of this notion (and so I can find it again), I give you the Tale of the Pacifist Baboon Troop:

In the early 1980s, "Forest Troop," a group of savanna baboons I had been studying -- virtually living with -- for years, was going about its business in a national park in Kenya when a neighboring baboon group had a stroke of luck: its territory encompassed a tourist lodge that expanded its operations and consequently the amount of food tossed into its a garbage dump. Baboons are omnivorous, and "Garbage Dump Troop" was delighted to feast on leftover drumsticks, half-eaten hamburgers, remnants of chocolate cake, and anything else that wound up there. Soon they had shifted to sleeping in the trees immediately above the pit, descending each morning just in time for the day's dumping of garbage. (They soon got quite obese from the rich diet and lack of exercise, but that is another story.)

The development produced nearly as dramatic a shift in the social behavior of Forest Troop. Each morning, approximately half of its adult males would infiltrate Garbage Dump Troop's territory, descending on the pit in time for the day's dumping and battling the resident males for access to the garbage. The Forest Troop males that did this shared two traits: they were particularly combative (which was necessary to get the food away from the other baboons), and they were not very interested in socializing (the raids took place early in the morning, during the hours when the bulk of a savanna baboon's daily communal grooming occurs).

Soon afterward, tuberculosis, a disease that moves with devastating speed and severity in nonhuman primates, broke out in Garbage Dump Troop. Over the next year, most of its members died, as did all of the males from Forest Troop who had foraged at the dump. The results were that Forest Troop was left with males who were less aggressive and more social than average and the troop now had double its previous female-to-male ratio.

The social consequences of these changes were dramatic. There remained a hierarchy among the Forest Troop males, but it was far looser than before: compared with other, more typical savanna baboon groups, high-ranking males rarely harassed subordinates and occasionally even relinquished contested resources to them. Aggression was less frequent, particularly against third parties. And rates of affiliative behaviors, such as males and females grooming each other or sitting together, soared. There were even instances, now and then, of adult males grooming each other – a behavior nearly as unprecedented as baboons sprouting wings. . . By the early 1990s, none of the original low aggression/high affiliation males of Forest Troop’s tuberculosis period was still alive; all of the group’s adult males had joined after the epidemic. Despite this, the troop’s unique social milieu persisted – as it does to this day, some 20 years after the selective bottleneck.

In other words, adolescent males that enter Forest Troop after having grown up elsewhere wind up adopting the unique behavioral style of the resident males. As defined by both anthropologists and animal behaviorists, “culture” consists of local behavioral variations, occurring for nongenetic and nonecological reasons, that last beyond the time of their originators. Forest Troop’s low aggression/high affiliation society constitutes nothing less than a multigenerational benign culture.

That's from primatologist Robert Sapolsky.

I believe very much in biology, and I also believe that our brains are just complex tissues that can get sick or damaged in lots of ways. So I suspect we will never be free from violence, cruelty, rape, and other scourges. But human cultures vary dramatically in how much violence, cruelty, and so on they experience. We can change these things, if we work at it.

Grounded

Back on the earth, never to fly again.

Virtue and Democracy in Greece

I have read a couple of left-wing pieces lately praising the protesters in Greece for their commitment to real democracy. I wish them well, but I really wonder what it is they expect their government to do. I am sure it is galling to see a bunch of sleek German economists in Italian suits descend on their country and order the raising of taxes and the slashing of government spending, but I have yet to read about any serious alternative.

The Greek state is bankrupt. After decades of corruption and the creation of what even one far left reporter called an "ever increasing army of civil service bureaucrats and professional syndicalists seeking and gaining the benefits of a clientelist state . . . implicated together in a lucrative but utterly careless para-economy", there is no money. Greece has long been funded by foreigners buying Greek government debt, and they no longer want to buy any more. Do the protesters think the Germans should order their bankers to buy more Greek bonds? Why would they want to do that?

I think that what Greece should do is default, withdraw from the Euro, and, yes, try to restore a real Greek democracy. (What do you know, I agree with the Socialist Worker.) But that would be economically catastrophic, leading to a decade of depression. All those Greek railroad employees who are losing their jobs now would have to lose them anyway. In return for a surrender of their independence the Greeks are getting billions more in foreign money. That money will keep the "clientelist state" going for a while, although at a lower level. The idea is to ease the shock, while also preserving the Euro and with it the illusion of European unity. I don't really like this plan but, as I said, I have yet to read of any other that wouldn't entail at least as much pain for ordinary Greeks.

It all makes me think back to the early days of democratic agitation in Europe and America, when revolution was all bound up with personal virtue. The pronouncements of revolutionaries in France and America were full of talk about the need for virtue, because, they said, people without it would inevitably become slaves. In Greece, the people have been displaying a remarkable lack of virtue for a long time -- bribing each other, refusing to pay taxes, demanding raises in their government sinecures, and so on, driving the state to bankruptcy. As a result they have effectively lost their independence. If they want "real democracy," they will have to start by being willing to pay enough in taxes to cover all the benefits they want from the government. Only then will they be free.

I have the same feelings about deficit spending in the US. If we want to be citizens of a free nation, we have to be willing to pay for the privilege. I am willing to debate what level of government spending and taxation is appropriate, but whatever the level is they ought to be the same.

Staging for Andrea Chernier

A floating stage on Lake Constance in Bregenz, Austria for a production of the opera Andrea Chernier by Umberto Giordan, directed by Keith Warner. (The opera is a tragedy, first performed in 1896, about a poet who was executed during the Terror.)

Villa Epucuen

Great feature at the Atlantic on the lost town of Villa Epucuen, Argentina:

Back in the 1920s, a tourist village was established along the shore of Lago Epecuen, a salt lake some 600 kilometers southwest of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The resort town, named Villa Epucuen, soon had a railroad station, and it thrived for several decades, peaking in the 1970s with a population of more than 5,000. Around the same time, a long-term weather event was delivering far more rain than usual to the surrounding hills for years, and Lago Epecuen began to swell. In 1985, the salty waters broke through an earthen dam, and Villa Epecuen was doomed. A slow-growing flood consumed the town until it reached a depth of 10 meters (33 feet) in 1993. The wet weather later reversed, and the waters began to recede in 2009.

DARPA Super Soldier Program

Via Danger Room, this initiative from DARPA -- the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency -- looks like a lot more than just battlefield medicine:

DARPA seeks to define the spatio-temporal instructive components encoded in cells in the context of their biological systems, through the application of advanced principles from evolutionary biology, genomics, mathematics, algorithm development, data mining, and the physical sciences. DARPA is soliciting research proposals for the Biochronicity program that will identify common spatio-temporal instructions or "clock signatures" in the genome, epigenome, proteome, and/or transcriptome across prokaryotic and eukaryotic species. The focus of the program will be on unraveling biological clock systems in prokaryotes and eukaryotes and the efforts of this initiative will contribute to the understanding and management of disease, trauma, human combat performance, and emerging infectious disease countermeasures. Additionally, a greater understanding of molecular oscillators and the evolution of biological clocks will lead to fundamental advancements in developmental science, drug development, aging, and cell death. These fundamental advancements in the understanding of timing in biology can be translated into major breakthroughs in trauma care on the battlefield by accessing the mechanisms that control biological time to improve patient outcomes, for example, by lengthening the window of opportunity for medical and treatment interventions.

Once we control cellular clocks, we will begin to construct super soldiers who experience no fatigue or aging. . . .

Modern Stone Tools

The underside of an old threshing sledge for sale in an antiques booth in Ankara. This sledge is certainly less than a century old, but the technique of creating tools like threshers and graters by putting stone flakes in the slots of wooden boards is at least 10,000 years old.

Michael Lewis on the Irish Collapse

I already recommended Michael Lewis' marvelous essay on the Greek financial collapse, and now let me recommend his equally fine piece on the collapse in Ireland. After roughly a thousand years as a poor country, Ireland in the 1990s rather suddenly started getting rich. Lewis:

How did any of this happen? There are many theories: the elimination of trade barriers, the decision to grant free public higher education, the persistent lowering of the corporate tax rate, beginning in the 1980s, which turned Ireland into a tax haven for foreign corporations. Maybe the most intriguing was offered by a pair of demographers at Harvard, David E. Bloom and David Canning, in a 2003 paper called “Contraception and the Celtic Tiger.” Bloom and Canning argued that a major cause of the Irish boom was a dramatic increase in the ratio of working-age to non-working-age Irish brought about by a crash in the Irish birthrate. This had been driven mainly by Ireland’s decision, in 1979, to legalize birth control. That is, a nation’s fidelity to the Vatican’s edicts was inversely proportional to its ability to climb out of poverty: out of the slow death of the Catholic Church arose an economic miracle.

The Harvard demographers admitted their theory explained only part of what had happened. At the bottom of the success of the Irish there remains, even now, some mystery. “It appeared like a miraculous beast materializing in a forest clearing,” writes the pre-eminent Irish historian R. F. Foster, “and economists are still not entirely sure why.” Not knowing why they were so suddenly so successful, the Irish can perhaps be forgiven for not knowing exactly how successful they were meant to be. They had gone from being abnormally poor to being abnormally rich, without pausing to experience normality. When, in the early 2000s, the financial markets began to offer virtually unlimited credit to all comers—when nations were let into the dark room with the pile of money and asked what they would like to do with it—the Irish were already in a peculiarly vulnerable state of mind. They’d spent the better part of a decade under something very like a magic spell.

Love that description of the lending mentality of the early 2000s, on which more later.

In 2008, after 20 years of boom times, Ireland's biggest banks all collapsed and now the country is looking at decades of austerity to pay the bills. To find out why, Lewis spoke with an obscure Irish economist named Morgan Kelly:

Morgan Kelly is a professor of economics at University College Dublin, but he did not, until recently, view it as his business to think much about the economy under his nose. He had written a handful of highly regarded academic papers on topics (such as “The Economic Impact of the Little Ice Age”) considered abstruse even by academic economists. “I only stumbled on this catastrophe by accident,” he says. “I had never been interested in the Irish economy. The Irish economy is tiny and boring.” Kelly saw house prices rising madly and heard young men in Irish finance to whom he had recently taught economics try to explain why the boom didn’t trouble them. And they troubled him. “Around the middle of 2006 all these former students of ours working for the banks started to appear on TV!” he says. “They were now all bank economists, and they were nice guys and all that. And they were all saying the same thing: ‘We’re going to have a soft landing.’ ”

The statement struck him as absurd: real-estate bubbles never end with soft landings. A bubble is inflated by nothing firmer than expectations. The moment people cease to believe that house prices will rise forever, they will notice what a terrible long-term investment real estate has become and flee the market, and the market will crash. It was in the nature of real-estate booms to end with crashes—just as it was perhaps in Morgan Kelly’s nature to assume that, if his former students were cast on Irish TV as financial experts, something was amiss. “I just started Googling things,” he says.

Googling things, Kelly learned that more than a fifth of the Irish workforce was employed building houses. The Irish construction industry had swollen to become nearly a quarter of the country’s G.D.P.—compared with less than 10 percent in a normal economy—and Ireland was building half as many new houses a year as the United Kingdom, which had almost 15 times as many people to house. He learned that since 1994 the average price for a Dublin home had risen more than 500 percent. In parts of the city, rents had fallen to less than 1 percent of the purchase price—that is, you could rent a million-dollar home for less than $833 a month. The investment returns on Irish land were ridiculously low: it made no sense for capital to flow into Ireland to develop more of it. Irish home prices implied an economic growth rate that would leave Ireland, in 25 years, three times as rich as the United States. (“A price/earning ratio above Google’s,” as Kelly put it.) Where would this growth come from? Since 2000, Irish exports had stalled, and the economy had been consumed with building houses and offices and hotels. “Competitiveness didn’t matter,” says Kelly. “From now on we were going to get rich building houses for each other.”

Which brings me back to the thing that still bothers me about the financial crisis. In the early 2000s there was so much money sloshing around world financial markets that investors could not think of anything better to do with it than to lend it to people who couldn't pay it back. The countryside of Ireland is now scattered with completely empty housing projects -- more than 180,000 vacant dwellings, newly built or unfinished, in a nation of 6 million, not to mention dozens of abandoned office buildings, shopping malls, and so on. Even in the gung ho world of early 2000s banking there were plenty of insiders rolling their eyes at the behavior of Irish banks. Yet investors still snapped up their bonds. Meanwhile in America we put a trillion or so dollars into sub-prime mortgages, and there were real estate bubbles in Chile, Australia, Spain, and sundry other places, all this at a time when most of the world's governments are running deficits, which is supposed to "crowd out" private investment. Even now, after trillions have been wiped out by the collapse, the real interest rate on US government bonds is negative.

I was always taught that the economic growth rate is limited by the amount of capital available to invest, so that more savings leads to more growth in the long term. I see no sign that this is true now. Instead we have trillions of dollars sloshing around the globe looking for any sort of return, and what we are short of it good ideas about how to invest it.

Edward Bancroft, or, Most Spying is Useless

Edward Bancroft was probably the most successful spy of the American Revolution. Attached to the American mission to France, he kept the British government very well informed about the ongoing negotiations. In particular, he warned Lord North that French recognition and aid would come very quickly after the American victory at Saratoga, which led North to send a commission to America offering everything the Americans sought in 1775. Bancroft was also a scientist, physician, and explorer, whose most significant discovery was probably the electrical activity of the electrical eel, so an all-around fascinating character, and I may end up reading the new biography by Thomas J. Schaeper.

What I find particularly interesting is the question of whether Bancroft's spying did the British any good. Benjamin Franklin famously refused to take precautions against spying on the grounds that nothing he did was worth keeping secret. Schaeper, after reviewing Bancroft's career carefully, seems to agree with Franklin:

What difference, if any, did Bancroft’s espionage really make? The basic answer seems to be, not much, if any at all. Information obtained in Europe could provide the British with a great source as to how much support the Americans were gaining from their alliance, but translating that into operational advantage, either at sea or an ocean away in North America, was virtually impossible. This was not the age of Magic or Enigma, and distant disclosures of critical intelligence rarely if ever had immediate application. On the diplomatic side, the major determinants of wartime diplomacy were the Americans’ October victories at Saratoga in 1777 and Yorktown in 1781. One brought alliance, the other brought peace, and Bancroft’s disclosures on both occasions did nothing to alter the course of diplomacy.

Even when spies deliver accurate information on future plans, politicians often cannot tell whether to believe them, and they often guess wrongly. (George III refused to believe that France was acting as quickly as Bancroft said they would.) Enormous investments in spying are made with the idea that perfect information will lead to better policy, but the evidence that this is so is very thin.

What difference did the enormous American and Soviet investment in Cold War espionage make to history? None, I say; the course of the conflict was determined by political and economic developments within the two countries. And no amount of information about American diplomacy could have saved the British government from their basic error of treating the colonists with contempt.

Zahi Fired Again

From the AP:

Egypt's antiquities minister, whose trademark Indiana Jones hat made him one the country's best known figures around the world, was fired Sunday after months of pressure from critics who attacked his credibility and accused him of having been too close to the regime of ousted President Hosni Mubarak.

Zahi Hawass, long chided as publicity loving and short on scientific knowledge, lost his job along with about a dozen other ministers in a Cabinet reshuffle meant to ease pressure from protesters seeking to purge remnants of Mubarak's regime.

"He was the Mubarak of antiquities," said Nora Shalaby, an activist and archaeologist. "He acted as if he owned Egypt's antiquities, and not that they belonged to the people of Egypt." . . .

"He was a personality created by the media," said Abdel-Halim Abdel-Nour, the president of the Association of Egyptian Archeologists.

Of course, Hawass has already lost his job once in Egypt's political turmoil and gotten it back, so it remains to be seen if this is permanent. He is quite an operator. But how sad it must be for him to see his own trademark hat equated with the totally different hat of Indiana Jones -- who, Hawass liked to say, was obviously a copy of him anyway. I beg to differ with Abdel-Halim Abdel-Nour, though; Hawass was his own creation, one of the great self-promoters of our self-promotional age, and if he was often on television that was because he used television (and Egypt's antiquities) as instruments of his self-glorification.

Incidentally, last week Kate Taylor laid out in the Times how some of Hawass' financial and political deal-making worked. He gets $200,000 a year from National Geographic as an "Explorer in Residence", even though he is not an explorer and lives at his own house, and everybody assumes this is so National Geographic writers and photographers will continue to get good access to Egyptian archaeological sites. The gift shop at the Egyptian museum was closed after it was reported that Hawass awarded the contract for operating it to an associate in a sweet deal. And:

He has relationships — albeit ones he says he does not profit from — with two American companies that do business in Egypt. One, Arts and Exhibitions International, secured Mr. Hawass’s permission several years ago to take some of the country’s most precious treasures, the artifacts of King Tut, on a world tour; its top executives recently started a separate venture to market a Zahi Hawass line of clothing.

A second company, Exhibit Merchandising, has been selling replicas of Mr. Hawass’s hat for several years. Last year that company was hired to operate a new store in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Mr. Hawass says his share of the profits from those products goes directly to Egyptian charities.

Which seems to have been largely true, with the twist that the charities Hawass favored were controlled by the wife of ex-President Mubarak. Hawass could say in his defense that this was how things were done in Egypt and the if he had not played by the rules he could not have done all the good work he did promoting Egyptian archaeology. But to Egyptians the point of their revolution was to end that whole way of doing business. So Hawass, an archetype of that system, has to go.

Iain Macarthur

English artist born in 1986. More here.

Peurile Men Hate Bossy Women

Readers may recall my post, back in February, about a tedious article by Kay Hymowitz titled "Where Have All the Good Men Gone?" the thesis of which is that men are spending their 20s in extended adolescence rather than manning up, getting jobs, and getting married. I just discovered her follow-up article, which consists mostly of quotations from emails she received from men after the first piece. It struck me that publishing inflammatory articles and then printing all the emails you get in response is an easy way to do journalism. Anyway, what do the men say?

It would be easy enough to hold up some of the callow ranting that the piece inspired as proof positive of the child-man’s existence. But the truth is that my correspondents’ objections gave me pause. Their argument, in effect, was that the SYM [single young man] is putting off traditional markers of adulthood—one wife, two kids, three bathrooms—not because he’s immature but because he’s angry. He’s angry because he thinks that young women are dishonest, self-involved, slutty, manipulative, shallow, controlling, and gold-digging. He’s angry because he thinks that the culture disses all things male. He’s angry because he thinks that marriage these days is a raw deal for men.

Here’s Jeff from Middleburg, Florida: “I am not going to hitch my wagon to a woman . . . who is more into her abs, thighs, triceps, and plastic surgery. A woman who seems to have forgotten that she did graduate high school and that it’s time to act accordingly.”

I don't find this sort of misogynistic ranting interesting or informative, except as a reminder of how much anger there is in the world that can attach itself to almost any target. Hymowitz offers this as an insight:

The reason for all this anger, I submit, is that the dating and mating scene is in chaos.

Followed by some nonsense about how much sense the dating scene of some imagined past America made. (For the record, my view is that there have been in human history two kinds of dating scenes: arranged marriage, and chaos.) There do seem to be people who worry a lot about the lack of rules, or silly crap like who pays for dinner, but if you ask me they are merely focusing the frustration of not easily finding the perfect partner (or getting lots of sex with hot babes) onto certain flash points so they have something concrete to complain about. The underlying problems are and always have been that it is hard to find love and hard to find, or sustain, sexual passion.

We then move on to the eternal complaint of men, that although women say they want nice men they all fall for arrogant jerks:

Young men grew up hearing from their mothers, their teachers, and Oprah that women wanted sensitive, kind, thoughtful, intelligent men who were in touch with their feminine sides. . . . Yeah, right, sneer a lot of veterans of the scene. Women don’t want Ashley Wilkes; they’re hot for Rhett Butler, for macho men with tight abs and an emotional range to match. One popular dating guru, David DeAngelo, ranks “Being Too Much of a Nice Guy” as Number One on his list of the “Ten Most Dangerous Mistakes Men Make with Women.”

According to a “Recovering Nice Guy” writing on Craigslist, the female preference for jerks and “assholes,” as they’re also widely known, lies behind women’s age-old lament, “What happened to all the nice guys?” His answer: “You did. You ignored the nice guy. You used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy.” Women, he says, are actually not attracted to men who hold doors for them, give them hinted-for Christmas gifts, or listen to their sorrows. Such a man, our Recovering Nice Guy continues, probably “came to realize that, if he wanted a woman like you, he’d have to act more like the boyfriend that you had. He probably cleaned up his look, started making some money, and generally acted like more of an asshole than he ever wanted to be.”

A friend of mine once belonged to an AOL loneliness support group that was entirely taken over by a bunch of guys who wanted to make this complaint unendingly. The thing is, she said, they only made this complaint about "hot" women, and were rudely dismissive of those who didn't meet their physical standards.

I think there is something to this, but not all that much. First, it conflicts with the other big complaint that men have about women, that all they care about is how much money you make. Plus, the nice guys I know have mostly managed to get married. Maybe they didn't marry the hottest women, but you know what? That doesn't matter. The only effect that attractiveness has been found to have on either the chance of getting married or marital satisfaction is that very attractive men have trouble staying married. Beautiful people are not happier, and being married to a beautiful person will not make you happy. If that's your agenda for life, rethink your agenda.

Hymowitz, incidentally, takes these male complaints seriously. Like many conservatives, she thinks it is up to women to keep up moral standards and make men toe the line, and she oozes disgust when she writes about promiscuous women. She concludes her piece with a line from one of her male correspondents, who wrote:

The behavior of men is simply a response (which is actually a quite logical one) to the changing behavior of women. Simply put, men are a breeding experiment run by women. You reap what you sow—and when a man can sow all he wants and leave the reaping to others, well, why not?

So there you have it, ladies; if men are jerks, it's mostly your fault.

As usual, I think this is all a way of talking about broad shifts in our economy and society. People are not marrying late because of something wrong with the dating scene. On the contrary, whatever is weird about the contemporary dating scene is created by late marriage, which means staying single much longer, rather than the other way around. The long transition to adulthood has more to do with economic factors, declining birth rates, and high housing costs than anger about the behavior of the opposite sex. Again I say, that in a world where nobody takes adults very seriously (least of all their employers), what is the point of taking that 50-hour-a-week office job? What do you get for it that makes the sacrifice worthwhile? People like Hymowitz need to worry less about whether people are jerks and more about how to make the rewards of work worth the sacrifice of taking a grown-up job.

Puzzled

Coraline does not know what to make of this box turtle.

Phlox

The deer ate all the buds off about a month ago, but it came back and now it looks great.

Retro-Maoism in China

Matthew Niederhauser in Time:

This summer, China is awash in red. As the nation commemorated the 90th anniversary of the CCP on July 1, hundreds of millions of schoolchildren, officials, retirees and even top Internet executives joined voices to sing "red songs" praising the motherland. Cinemas have rolled out the red carpet for a blockbuster propaganda film about the creation of the party. Local governments have sent out text messages with pithy quotes from Mao Zedong, the founder of the People's Republic, whose Little Red Book of sayings has for years been mere flea-market kitsch. . . .

Leading the revival of attention to the CCP's history, myths, symbols and beliefs is an unlikely figure: Bo Xilai, party secretary of megalopolis Chongqing and the closest thing to a political rock star in China. In June, under Bo's directive, some 50,000 Chongqing residents flocked to a stadium to belt out red songs. Bo has replaced moneymaking commercials on local TV with red programming, and he has ordered cadres to the countryside to "learn from the peasants" — an echo of Mao's disastrous rural revolution.

The resurgence of Maoism in China seems to represent a combination of politicking by the Communist Part, which wants to remain relevant, and nostalgia for the good old days of equality and shared struggle among many older Chinese. Told in the right way, the story of China's revolution is inspiring: a ragtag band of peasants and intellectuals overcoming the Kuomintang and the warlords, leveling the vastly unequal system, abolishing foot binding and other aspects of the horrific sexism, etc. In 1956 the Communists were hugely popular in China. Then came the madness of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and all the rest of Mao's murderous assault on his own country. For most Chinese, even most Communists, those self-inflicted disasters so tarnished Maoism that they don't want to hear any more about it. But it is easy to see why some people, shocked by the incredible changes in China, long for simpler times when everyone ate the same food and had the same agenda. And for the party, troubled by corruption and unsure about the morality of the economic changes it has unleashed, the heroism of the Long March seems as good a place as any to look for renewal.

Tasashi Kobayashi, Shrike

Word of the Day: Jargogle

Jargogle, a verg meaning “To confuse, jumble.”

John Locke: “I fear, that the jumbling of those good and plausible Words in your Head. . . might a little jargogle your Thoughts. . . ."