42,000 Years of Deep Sea Fishing

Nature News:

The world's oldest fish hook has been unearthed at a site in East Timor, alongside evidence that modern humans were catching fish from the open ocean as far back as 42,000 years ago. The discoveries, from a limestone cave site known as the Jerimalai shelter on the north of the island, are published today in Science.

Sue O'Connor, an archaeologist at the Australian National University in Canberra, and her colleagues found two broken fish hooks made from shells. They dated one to approximately 11,000 years old and the other to between 23,000 and 16,000 years old — the earliest known example of fish-hook manufacture.

The oldest previously known fish hooks are associated with the beginnings of agriculture, which in South East Asia was around 5,500 years ago, says O'Connor.

The team also found more than 38,000 fish bones at the site, dating the oldest back to 42,000 years ago. Some were from inshore species, but almost half were from 'pelagic species' — fish that dwell in the open ocean, providing the oldest known evidence of humans fishing far from shore. The most commonly found pelagic species at the site were Tuna, but there was also evidence of humans eating sharks and rays, among others.

“That these types of fish were being routinely caught 40,000 years ago is extraordinary,” says O'Connor. “It requires complex technology and shows that early modern humans in island South East Asia had amazingly advanced maritime skills.”

Since people made it to Australia 50,000 years ago, they were obviously capable of crossing deep seas. This evidence of deep sea fishing may help explain how they got that skill. Note that hominid fishing is older than Homo sapiens:

Far older fish bones have been found at sites in southern Africa – those at the Blombos Cave in South Africa, for example, date from 140,000–50,000 years ago – but they have generally been from inshore species whose capture would require less complex technology. A small number of tuna vertebrae have been found, but these can be attributed to scavenging of fish washed up on beaches, says Richard Klein, an archaeologist at Stanford University in California, who has worked extensively in the region. The oldest known fishing tackle from the vicinity dates from around 12,000 years ago, but it includes only bone gorges (straight hooks) and net sinkers, probably used exclusively inshore, he adds.

O'Connor thinks that coastal sites that could have provided more evidence of early maritime technology in Africa may have disappeared owing to a rise in sea levels over time. The Jerimalai site — which was preserved because it perches high up on the edge of an geologically uplifting coastline — provides a “window into what early modern humans were capable of”, she says.

Perpetual War

Peter Beinart listened to the Republican candidates talk about war this weekend, and he did not like what he heard:

Within the first few minutes of the GOP debate, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Rick Santorum had all declared the United States at war while answering a question about the Patriot Act. In making this assertion, none of them mentioned Afghanistan or Iraq, the two countries where large numbers of U.S. troops have in recent years actually been fighting. No, for the Republican presidential candidates, talking about Iraq and Afghanistan is thinking small. They were talking about America’s “war against terror,” a war they believe should define the way the U.S. government approaches civil liberties, and spends money, for, in Gingrich’s words, “the rest of our lives.” . . .

Do we look like a nation at war? The small segment of the American population that serves in the military is still fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the rest of the nation has utterly lost interest. And when those two wars mercifully end—as they likely will no matter who is president in the next few years—America will be a peacetime nation again. At some level, the leading Republican presidential candidates understand that. They would never dream of suggesting that America’s “war on terror” requires higher taxes, a draft or anything else that would burden the ordinary American. And yet they keep using the language of war to insulate America’s defense budget from serious scrutiny and to suggest that people accused of terrorism don’t deserve basic protections under the law.

The Collapse of the Church Hill Tunnel

On October 2, 1925, a 4,000-foot long (1200 m) railroad tunnel under Church Hill in Richmond, Virginia collapsed. Four railroad workers a locomotive, and ten flat cars were trapped inside. One man managed to drag himself out, but he died soon afterward. One body was dug out.

Despite strenuous efforts, including the digging of new shafts (above) the rescuers were unable to reach the other men. The tunnel had to be abandoned:

Huge yawning cracks, opening with fearful rapidity, over the entire section of Jefferson Park Hill where the big steam shovel had been cutting away tons of earth in the effort to reach the engineer and negro workman who were caught underneath the cave-in of the Chesapeake and Ohio tunnel, off Nineteenth Street, late Friday afternoon caused the officials in charge of the rescue work to abandon that steam shovel at 3:30 o'clock yesterday afternoon.

Many of the gaping openings in the side of the hill measured many feet in width and went to a distance of thirty feet or more, so numerous were the openings that the hillside near the scene of the tragedy resembled a giant cake that had been broken into bits by a family of hungry urchins. . . .

The tunnel had been built in 1872 to 1873. One section had collapsed during construction, but this sign of the soil's instability was ignored, and work went on. The point was to connect Richmond's railroads to a line running to the new coal pier at Newport News. The tunnel remained in service until 1902, when a new viaduct took over this function. In 1925, the Chesapeake and Ohio RR was trying to re-open the line when the catastrophic collapse took place.

The train and the workmen's bodies are still down there, in the sealed tunnel. Local legend has it that people sometimes here the the trapped men shouting for help, or trying to dig their way out with picks. At top, the sealed eastern end of the tunnel. Above, the approximate location of the buried tunnel on a modern map.

The Perfect American News Story

Police brutality meets Black Friday shopping:

Police: Woman anxious to get Xbox uses pepper spray on other Black Friday shoppers, 20 injured

Thanksgiving 2011

Things I feel thankful for today:

The courage of the people in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Bahrain, bringing a new birth of freedom to the world.

That trees change color in the fall.

Audio books.

Being able to watch Mythbusters with my kids.

Patapsco State Park, the forest by my house.

My healthy, thriving family.

The Elder Scrolls.

Google image search.

The Cassini mission to Saturn.

Public libraries.

The Large Hadron Collider.

That I still have one child who likes animal pancakes.

The Beard Cutting Gang

The indictment of seven men from Sam Mullet's Amish splinter group provides a few more details on the bizarre actions of Mullet's beard-cutting thugs. To quote the Times:

The distinctive beards worn by married Amish men, and the uncut hair that married women keep rolled in buns, are treasured symbols of religious identity, and the attacks appeared intended to inflict public humiliation. . . .

In at least four violent attacks over the last few months, groups of men from Mr. Mullet’s compound held men down to shear their beards with scissors and battery-operated clippers, according to the authorities. In one case, they said, several of Mr. Mullet’s nephews also hacked off the hair of their own mother — Mr. Mullet’s sister — who had fled the compound years earlier.

It seems there have actually been several other such attacks, but the Amish, famously reluctant to get involved with the state, refused to cooperate with the sheriff in investigating them. Now, though, Mullet's boys have gone so far that witnesses are coming forward.

What on earth is this about? It seems that the attacks are "religiously motivated," as the sheriff put it, Mullet's own way of enforcing discipline on Amish that he thinks are straying from the path. 'You don't obey the law, you're punished, and it's the same way with the church,' Mullet is supposed to have said. Some of the stories coming out now make Mullet seem like a typical cult leader:

A former member of the Bergholz Clan - the group thought to be behind the beard cutting - has spoken out against them, claiming that leader Sam Mullet rules the cult with an iron fist and said he wouldn't be surprised if it ended in mass suicide or some other tragedy.

The man, who did not want to be named, told WKYC that Mullet moved to Bergholz about 15 years ago with around 120 member who all have to live by his rules. . . .

'I have enough inside information that I have no question if something is not done, there will be people that get hurt.'

The former member says there were forced beatings, pitting one member against another and there are heavy punishments when members disagree with bishop Mullet. He said: 'He would take the wife from the man. The wife would have to go and live with Sam. The husband of that wife would have to go to the chicken coop or out in the barn in the middle of the winter, sometimes day and night.'

Arlene Miller, whose husband Myron Miller had his beard cut off by the gang earlier this month, said she heard many stories about the 'brainwashing, the beatings, the locking up, and the women he is using'.

Arlene Miller said she and her husband helped one of Mullet's sons - Bill - escape from the clan and believes that may have been one of the reasons why he was attacked.

The Times has some of the same stories:

Former residents of Mr. Mullet’s compound said he exerted iron control over the settlement of 120, many of them his relatives, sometimes imprisoning men in a chicken coop for days or beating them. Former residents also said that Mr. Mullet had sex with married women in the community “to cleanse them of the devil,” according to the F.B.I. affidavit.

Of course these sorts of stories get passed around about all groups of people who live in compounds and don't get along with their neighbors, and the Amish can gossip as viciously as anyone else. But surely there is something very strange behind the appearance of an Amish beard-cutting gang.

David Grann, The Lost City of Z

I just finished listening to this interesting little book, and I recommend it highly. David Grann is a staff writer with the New Yorker, and he put a great deal of effort into researching and writing this layered tale of exploration and madness. The Lost City of Z: a Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon retells the famous story of Percy Harrison Fawcett, an English explorer who vanished in the Amazon in 1925. At the time this was one of the most heavily covered news stories in the world, and dozens of expeditions to find Fawcett and his men were mounted by everyone from experienced explorers to failed B movie actors. None of them succeeded, and several of the would-be rescuers also failed to return. The tale of Z and Fawcett's quest to find it is as alluring today as it was in 1925.

I have noticed that in grading student papers it is sometimes necessary to ignore the introductory paragraph. Students whose initial sentences are an unreadable muck of platitudes, with bad grammar and worse choice of words, sometimes settle down and do reasonably well once they get into the meat of their papers. So it is with this book; the introduction was such a mass of clichés that I almost turned off the cd, but I am glad that I kept going. Once the attempt at an alluring hook is past, Grann's writing is not bad, and the story is wonderful. Perhaps he fell into cliché because the story is in so many ways archetypical: the hero, obsessed by a glowing vision of a golden city, embarks on a quest that some think is mad, and then vanishes, leaving a mystery still not solved.

Fawcett was a British artillery officer who grew bored with garrison life and enrolled in the Royal Geographical Society's course on how to be an explorer. After learning map-making, celestial navigation, survival skills, and the like, he embarked on a career of filling the blank spots on the map of South America. His first assignment was to map the border between Bolivia and Brazil. Aided by an amazing constitution that kept him healthy amidst the world's most disease-ridden jungles, he carried out several more expeditions over the years from 1906 to 1914. He learned bits of some Indian languages and made it his policy to work in small, lightly armed teams, always approaching Indians peacefully. From his Indian friends Fawcett heard stories that he interpreted as memories of a long-lost Indian civilization, centered on a great city that he called Z. He also recognized signs of ancient cultures in regions that were by 1900 nearly uninhabited: mounds covered with pottery, rock paintings, ancient roads.

In Grann's version of the tale, Fawcett was sane and scientific about Z in this early period. But then came World War I, and Fawcett, still an artillery officer, reported for duty on the Western Front. He served through the whole war, including the entire Battle of the Somme. Weighed down by the horrors he witnessed, he turned ever more against western "civilization" and longed to return to the jungle. Grann detects a shift in Fawcett's writings about Z during the war, from an archaeological problem to a quest for a sort of salvation. Fawcett grew increasingly interested in spiritualism -- according to some reports, he used a ouija board to pick artillery targets -- and he visited mediums who told him about Z in its days of glory. He published an article in a spiritual journal in which he described his search for Z as a spiritual quest for enlightenment. Many of his papers from this period were later destroyed by one of his sons, who found them embarrassing.

After the war Fawcett tried immediately to get back to the Amazon, but the Royal Geographical Society was broke and he could not get funding. He scraped together the money for a two-man expedition, which had to be aborted when his companion fell ill. Then, with the help of an American promoter, he raised funds from newspapers on the condition that he file regular stories about his progress. (I thought this was a great sign of how the world changed in the twentieth century, as aristocracy yielded to the power of mass media.) On this final trip he took along with him his eldest son, Jack, and Jack's best friend. They all disappeared into the Xingu region of Brazil and were never heard from again.

Grann, who had never even been camping before, conceived a sort of mad adventure of his own, following in Fawcett's footsteps. In the book chapters on Fawcett's progress alternate with chapters on Grann's bumbling quest. Some parts of Grann's journey are fascinating, for example when he meets members of a Brazilian religious cult that believes Fawcett passed through a portal into another dimension, where the pure live forever. Eventually he ends up among the Indians in the region where Fawcett disappeared, and the Indians confirm, more or less, that Fawcett was killed by hostile tribesmen.

While in this region, Grann, who by now has come to think that Fawcett was insane and his quest for a Z a folly, meets archaeologist Michael Heckenberger. Heckenberger is one of the leaders of the new school of Amazonian archaeology that has documented evidence of large settlements and high populations through out the region. He shows Grann the boundary ditch of a large settlement just a mile from the very village he was staying in, and explains that the region was crowded with settlements in the 800 to 1600 AD period.

To Grann this new evidence shows that Fawcett was not crazy after all, but I wonder. Certainly the Spanish accounts of large Indian populations in the 16th century, on which Fawcett relied, have been largely confirmed. But was there in the Amazon anything we would want to call a "civilization", let along a great city gleaming with gold? My interpretation is that the more advanced Amazon tribes were something like the Mississippian Indians of the same period in North America. They built impressive earthworks, including large collections of mounds in their ceremonial centers, traded across large distances, and created marvelous works of art. Yet none of their cities endured, and most of the people lived in a basic neolithic way, still depending on hunting and gathering for much of their food. They built no gleaming cities.

So while Fawcett was onto something, he was not onto the right thing. I think Grann is right that his quest for Z took on tones of spiritualism and possibly madness. The enormous appeal of Z and Fawcett's quest for it, the way the story fits into our minds like a key in a lock, is to me the most fascinating thing of all. The story is in fact so old and haggard that Fawcett's own older brother had written a novel, back in 1894, about a lost city in the jungle; in the novel, everyone who searches for the city disappears. Fawcett made up a story and cast himself as the central character, a story about a man who found a lost city in the jungle and thereby won fame, fortune, and happiness. He believed in it so powerfully that he sacrificed his own life, and those of his son and another young man, on the altar of his vision. Life, he eventually discovered, is rather different from the stories we like to tell ourselves about it.

Marcahuamachuco

Marcahuamachuco is a pre-Inca archaeological site in Peru, occupied from AD 300 to 700.

Until recently it was very difficult to get there, but a new road has been built into the area, tourism is increasing, and the Global Heritage Fund has take on the preservation of the site as a project. The site has been severely looted, and although there have been several multi-year archaeological investigations, few impressive artifacts have made it into official hands.

Like Machu Picchu, to which it is often compared, the site is located on a high plateau in what is today a remote district, making for spectacular views. The plateau has an elevation of 3,200 meters (10,000 feet) and is quite large, measuring about 5 kilometers long and 500 meters wide (3 miles by 1600 feet). The ruins are extensive and include several separate structures, plus numerous grave mounds.

One of the most striking features of the site is these double-walled enclosures; nobody knows why the double wall. No other structures like them are known in the region. In fact, it is entirely unclear where the people who built the citadels came from or what culture they belonged to.

Inca road building is justly famous, but they were building on a tradition that goes back to much earlier times, as in this road to Marcahuamachuco.

I haven't been able to find out what these are.

The Emperor's Carpet

Detail. In the Metropolitan Museum.

Gingrich Talks Sense on Immigration

His rivals are trying to turn what Newt Gingrich said about immigration last night against him, but thought it was the best statement I've heard on the subject all year:

If you're here -- if you've come here recently, you have no ties to this country, you ought to go home. period. If you've been here 25 years and you got three kids and two grandkids, you've been paying taxes and obeying the law, you belong to a local church, I don't think we're going to separate you from your family, uproot you forcefully and kick you out. . . .

Well, I mean, two things, first of all, in the DREAM Act, the one part that I like is the one which allows people who came here with their parents to join the U.S. military, which they could have done if they were back home, and if they serve on it with the U.S. military to acquire citizenship, which is something any foreigner can do. And I don't see any reason to punish somebody who came here at three years of age, but who wants to serve the United States of America. I specifically did not say we'd make the 11 million people legal. I do suggest if you go back to your district, and you find people who have been here 25 years and have two generations of family and have been paying taxes and are in a local church, as somebody who believes strongly in family, you'll have a hard time explaining why that particular subset is being broken up and forced to leave, given the fact that they've been law-abiding citizens for 25 years.

It's crazy to think we are going to expel 11 million Americans, some of whom have lived here almost their whole lives. Nice to see a Republican admit this.

Breeding Healthier Dogs

I confess that when it comes to breeding dogs or cats for a certain look, my attitude is very close to PETA's: what a grotesque misuse of our intelligence and power. The Times had an article yesterday on bulldogs, by Benoit Denizet-Lewis, focusing on the health problems of the breed and what we might do to help them. He quotes a BBC documentary as saying:

There is little doubt that the anatomy of the English bulldog has considerable capacity to cause suffering. The breed is noted to have locomotion difficulties, breathing problems, an inability to mate or give birth without assistance. . . . Many would question whether the breed’s quality of life is so compromised that its breeding should be banned.

Above,

a rendering of what a healthier breed of bulldog might look like, based on input from veterinarians: A) short snout made longer; B) skin folds reduced; C) body made leaner; D) tail elongated; E) hips widened.

If we are going to breed pets for anything, we should start with good health and happiness.

Santiago Caltrava: Balance

From his gorgeous web site.

The Checklist that Brought Them Home

For sale (click to enlarge):

They are some of the most famous words in the history of the NASA Space Program: "Houston, we have a problem." Now, the Lunar Module Systems Activation Checklist upon which Commander James Lovell made his handwritten calculations to guide his wounded spacecraft and crew home - scant two hours after uttering those famous words - has been consigned by Commander Lovell himself and is expected to bring $25,000+ when it comes across the block as part of Heritage Auctions' Nov. 30 Space Signature(r) Auction.

The First Rule of Politics

The first rule of politics is, don't invade Afghanistan.

--Harold Macmillan (1894-1986)

Kandovan, Iran

Kandovan is a village in northwest Iran famous for its cave dwellings, hacked into the soft volcanic stone of these eroded hills. Some of the houses are at least 700 years old. Local legend connects the founding of the village with the Mongol invasion of the region in the 1200s, but since ancient Greek authors mentioned cave dwellings in Persia, they could be much older.

What a cute house.

What a fantastic place. I hope there aren't any underground nuclear facilities anywhere nearby.

These interiors look pretty comfortable, with electric lights. There is a cave hotel you can stay it, should you ever be in the area.

Bullying is Complicated

Julian Sanchez has a very interesting post up on why it is impossible to measure "bullying," and why trying might not be a very good idea:

On the victim’s side, even a teen who is conscious of being the victim of bullying might feel ashamed to admit it. But it’s actually more complicated than that, because once we move out of the realm of bullying as simple physical assault, the difference between psychological bullying and more innocuous types of ribbing or reciprocal verbal aggression ultimately comes down to how the teens themselves feel about it. So a teen who denies being “bullied” and appears to shrug off various kinds of social animosity as just “drama” is not necessarily in denial about the independent, objective fact that they really are being bullied. Rather, insisting on adopting the attitude that they’re on equal footing with their aggressors (and so not bullied) may be a primary determinant of whether or not this is, in fact, the case: Telling yourself that you don’t care what those jerks say about you is often part of the process of actually ceasing to care what those jerks say about you—or at least, ceasing to care much. On the victim’s side, then, psychological bullying is hard to quantify, because “bullying” is not always an observer-independent natural fact: Denying that you are being bullied is sometimes a means of making it true that you are not (successfully) bullied.

And on the side of the aggressors, Sanchez offers a sort of parable from philosopher Derek Parfit called “The Harmless Torturers”:

Parfit imagines one scenario in which 10,000 torturers each torture one of 10,000 victims using an electrocution machine. Each torturer clearly inflicts terrible agony on an individual victim. In Parfit’s second scenario, each torturer’s machine is configured so as to deliver one-ten-thousandth of the same voltage—a quantity so small as to be utterly imperceptible to the victim by itself—to all of the victims who were individually electrified in the first scenario. In the aggregate, the torturers inflict exactly the same amount of pain on exactly the same number of people. But in this second scenario, each torturer can—with some justice—claim that his actions are “harmless.” Each, in other words, can claim: “If I stayed home, there is not one of those 10,000 victims who would feel any difference.”

As applied to physical torture, the scenario is fanciful. As applied to psychological torture, it describes the norm. Only a few really horrid people commit themselves to relentlessly harassing and abusing a single individual. But many teens—and not a few nominal adults—will make a handful of snarky and cutting remarks to numerous different individuals over the course of an ordinary day. It would often be overblown to characterize any particular remark as bullying: In isolation, all but the most fragile of us would shrug it off. In the aggregate, they may be intolerable to even the most self-assured.

Bathtime for the Cardinals

Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal in our puddle, today.

The Witch Bonney

Atlas Obscura has this terrific legend about a family monument in the Lowell Cemetery, Lowell, Massachusetts:

The Witch Bonney is a statue of a woman with her arms outstretched on a rectangular tomb. Her hands clutch a veil that falls down behind her body as though it were a sheet billowing in the wind. Her eyes are holes staring at the sky. Under her left eye, a black tear stains through the greening tarnish. Her dress is toga-style and its folds fall off both shoulders, exposing the upper parts of each breast. The fabric falls at an angle where one could mistake its level of exposure. The legend as told by the local high school students is that her dress gets lower and lower starting each October until, finally, her breasts are fully exposed on October 31st. However, given the Wiccans who leave offerings regularly and congregate there each Halloween, this probably would have been corroborated by witnesses. Other legends include a fellow statue as her guardian, a lion tombstone just in the line of her gaze, and also a tale of her rebirth in a tree. Groundskeepers trim all potential resurrection places nearby.

I mean, who cares about calling the devil and all that nonsense? Here's a graveyard statue that gives teenage boys what really interests them.

Republican Madness

David Frum:

Conscious cynicism is much rarer than you might suppose. Few of us have the self-knowledge and emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don’t usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves. Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know—canny investors, erudite authors—sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for him—and yet that is done too. . . .

The thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”

When contemplating the ruthless brilliance of this system, it’s tempting to fall back on the theory that the GOP is masterminded by a cadre of sinister billionaires, deftly manipulating the political process for their own benefit. The billionaires do exist, and some do indeed attempt to influence the political process. . . . Yet, for the most part, these Republican billionaires are not acting cynically. They watch Fox News too, and they’re gripped by the same apocalyptic fears as the Republican base. In funding the tea-party movement, they are ­actually acting against their own longer-term interests, for it is the richest who have the most interest in political stability, which depends upon broad societal agreement that the existing distribution of rewards is fair and reasonable. If the social order comes to seem unjust to large numbers of people, what happens next will make Occupy Wall Street look like a street fair. . . .

It’s a duty to scrutinize the actions and decisions of the incumbent administration, but an abuse to use the filibuster as a routine tool of legislation or to prevent dozens of presidential appointments from even coming to a vote. It’s fine to be unconcerned that the rich are getting richer, but blind to deny that ­middle-class wages have stagnated or worse over the past dozen years. In the aftershock of 2008, large numbers of Americans feel exploited and abused. Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares. This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.

Fairy Wasps: the Smallest Insects

The fairy wasp, Megaphragma mymaripenne, is the smallest known insect. Yes, they are the same size as amoebae. They can live out their entire life cycle inside the egg of a water beetle.

Adipotide

Cancer biologists Renata Pasqualini and Wadih Arap, who run a lab together at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, are testing a novel drug to fight obesity. Using the model of drugs that kill tumors by cutting off their blood supply, they found a drug that cuts off the blood supply of fatty tissue. They published a study back in 2004 showing that the drug made obese mice lose weight, and now they have published impressive results from studies of monkeys. The animals received the drug for 4 weeks and were followed for another 4 weeks.

The treated animals lost between 7% and 15% of their body weight, and their waist circumference dropped by up to 14%.

The drug is called adipotide, and it consists of a peptide that the body delivers to fat cells, attached to a cell-killing molecule.

Very weird science; another expert in the field interviewed by ScienceNow said, "The idea of choking adipose tissue off from its blood supply to make an animal leaner seemed incredibly wrong." But so far it seems to work.

Conspiracy Theories and the Fantasy of "Common Sense"

One thing uniting both American populist movements of the past few years, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, is the belief that their obviously correct ideas are being thwarted by malign forces. Julian Sanchez analyzes this notion in a little essay about OWS:

For most of human history, we’ve spent our whole lives in social clusters of a few hundred people—we’re basically hardwired for groups of that size. That makes it easy to look at a throng of a few thousand out at a rally and tell yourself, as another familiar chant has it: “This is what democracy looks like.”

Except, of course, it isn’t really. Or at any rate, it’s only a tiny part of what democracy looks like.

A small group of people self-selected for their commitment to some set of shared goals and values may be able to pick a set of slogans to chant in unison, or resolve their limited disagreements by consensus process. But real democracy in a pluralist society involves deep and often ineradicable disagreement—and not just on the optimal uses of public parks and other commons. It’s true, of course, that concentrated and wealthy interests routinely capture the apparatus of government, and use it to serve ends inimical to the general good. But a frame that sets up an opposition between “the 99%” and “the 1%” —or, if you prefer, between “Washington/media elites” and “Real America”—suggests a vain hope that profound political differences are, at least in some spheres, an illusion manufactured by some small minority. . . .

Spend a few weeks in a self-selected community, and perhaps it becomes possible to believe that 99% of us really are all on the same page—or at least, would be if we weren’t brainwashed by the 1%. This has long been a major strain in conservative thinking: Everyone would see that our views are just simple common sense—obviously correct!—if not for a liberal media cabal systematically lying to people all day. Dark as this sounds, it’s utopian in one sense: It implies we’d all agree but for the malign influence of this or that small but powerful group.

Will Wilkinson adds:

But we will never all agree. Refractory disagreement is a bedrock fact of liberal society. As is, I would add, the darkly utopian idea Mr Sanchez identifies: the notion that disagreement is a product of malign, illegitimate, external influence. We are much too confident in our political beliefs, and our over-confidence is sustained in part by just-so stories about why others fail to see things our way. The liberal media! Right-wing think tanks! The socialist indoctrination camps known as "colleges"! George Soros! The Koch brothers! The Bilderbergers! Corporations! The state! The military-industrial complex!

There is something profoundly satisfying about believing that one's own team alone has seen through the fog of disinformation and propaganda to the real truth about the treacherous interests that stand between our condition and the reign of justice. And there is something terrifically exciting about the sense, often engendered by visible protest movements, that one's own team is growing, that its narrative is catching on. Conversely, there is something profoundly dissatisfying, and a little bit demoralising, in acknowledging that most people will never accept many of ones' most ardently- held convictions, and that, therefore, none of us will ever get to live in a society that closely matches, or even roughly approximates, our beloved ideals. But it's true all the same. And it's true all the same that our actual democracy, for all its problems, does about as well as democracy can be realistically expected to do, given the size and diversity of this country. Frankly, we're pretty lucky our democracy works as well as it does. There's a great deal we can do to make it a little better, but there's very little we can do to make it a lot better, because we'll almost never agree enough about the really big stuff.

The longing for agreement, to have everyone pulling together toward the same goal, is at the root of both utopian projects and authoritarian government. Real democracy, in contrast, must be built on a foundation of disagreement. Real freedom only begins when we accept they many people are not like us. This means that democracy is always in danger of collapsing in the face of irreconcilable differences. It can only endure if we all adapt a live and let live attitude toward our fellow citizens, however horrific we find their beliefs.

American Theocracy

The always frightening Rick Santorum told Iowa Republicans this weekend that everything immoral -- according to his interpretation of Christianity -- ought to be illegal:

Our founders understood liberty is not what you want to do, but what you ought to do. That’s what liberty really is about. . . . God gave us rights, but He also gave us laws upon which to exercise those rights, and that’s what you ought to do. And, by the way, the law should comport—the laws of this country should comport with that moral vision. Why? Because the law is a teacher. If something is illegal in this country because it is immoral and it is wrong and it is harmful to society, saying that it is illegal and putting a law in place teaches. It’s not just—laws cannot be neutral. There is no neutral, Ron. There is only moral and immoral. And the law has to reflect what is right and good and just for our society.

Whenever some anthropologist says that we just can't understand people from other societies because our assumptions are so different and so on, I think, how could anybody's way of viewing the world be more different from mine than Rick Santorum's is?

The State Does Not Live Here

So goes an old saw frequently repeated by the villagers of Istalif, Afghanistan, studied in a new book by American anthropologist Noah Coburn. Instead of clear lines of authority, Coburn found a confusing mass of negotiations and arrangements, with no one really in charge:

Local power brokers might possess wealth, honor, a reputation for piety, abundant weaponry or powerful allies, but they lacked the means or the will to convert those gifts into decisive authority. The maliks, or elders, made a big show of representing their communities’ interests in meetings with outsiders and serving their followers generous meals; each year they presided over festive villagewide “snow picnics,” where the children of Istalif playfully competed to wreck one another’s snow-and-ice dams on the terraced hills above the town. But for all their public visibility, the maliks were only as strong as their communities allowed them to be; they were not secure hereditary chieftains but anxious agents of the professions or neighborhoods or clans they served. . . . The mullahs, for their part, had little ability to intervene outside the mosque, and the village’s wealthy merchants had little sway since they lived primarily in Kabul and often came from the low-status weaver class. Aging commanders of the anti-Soviet jihad supplied money and guns to young men, who struck a menacing pose by wearing the “pakul” hat of the great Tajik fighter Ahmed Shah Massoud, rather than the “karakul” hat favored by Hamid Karzai. While the commanders successfully extorted rent from local merchants who ran shops on public lands, they were unpopular and preferred to remain in the shadows, strenuously avoiding one another as well as any direct conflict with the state.

As always in traditional societies, there is great fear of anything that might upset the existing balance of power:

Coburn found that local leaders often achieved little by design. He watched in disbelief as they rejected a proposal to pave the main road connecting Istalif with the nearby highway leading to Kabul. The new road would have benefited the entire village by reducing the difficulty and cost of travel; but one malik objected that its construction would disproportionately assist another malik’s sector of the town, and the proposal was quietly tabled. In other words, to disturb the existing distribution of power was to risk reigniting too many local conflicts. And as in the American white-collar workplace, no one was eager to speak strongly on behalf of the idea for fear of losing face if it failed. In Istalif, it often seemed, politics meant convincing people you had power by forestalling any event that might reveal you didn’t.

Government is useless, the regional governor ignored by everyone. NATO soldiers are respected when they show up but forgotten as soon as they leave. Coburn is particularly scathing about NGOs, whose ignorance leads them to give gifts to people who cannot use them and needlessly stir up trouble. (Scorn toward NGOs seems to be a requirement for tough, in-the-know writers these days.) Attempts to create a modern democracy in such a society, it goes nearly without saying, are doomed to irrelevance.

Thinking about this, it occurred to me that much of the world lived in societies like this one as little as a century ago. Yet across North Africa and the Middle East, things have changed a great deal. I once read a book about tribal culture in Libya that was eerily like Coburn's portrayal of Afghanistan, but Libya has just experienced a very modern revolution and may soon have some sort of democracy. The changes that matter most are, it seems to me, are urbanization, education, and the spread of modern economic life (in which people have jobs with companies or the government, rather than working together with friends).

Of course, something is lost when a society moved from informal tribal arrangements to a modern state. But it is foolish to think that any society could have the benefits of modernity (women's rights, medical care, air conditioning, hot showers) without adapting bureaucratic, hierarchical power structure of modern governments and corporations. (Above, some of Istalif's modestly famous pottery.)

Three Ways to Reduce Inequality

Regular readers know that while I am worried about rising inequality in America, I doubt that anyone really knows what to do about it. In an op-ed today, Larry Summers has three suggestions:

First, government must not facilitate increases in inequality by rewarding the wealthy with special concessions. Where governments dispose of assets or allocate licenses, preference should be on the use of auctions to which all have access. Where government provides implicit or explicit insurance, premiums should be based on the market rather than in consultation with the affected industry. Government’s general posture should be standing up for capitalism rather than for well-connected capitalists.

Well, that was pretty vague, and seems to me to have limited relevance, but by all means wealthy corporations and individuals should have to pay for whatever the government gives them.

Second, there is scope for pro-fairness, pro-growth tax reform. The moment when more great fortunes are being created and the federal deficit is growing is hardly the time for the estate tax to be eviscerated. And there is no reason tax changes in a period of sharply rising inequality should reinforce the trends in pretax incomes produced by the marketplace.

Yes, lets raise the estate tax. But what the rest of this means I do not know. I suggest taxing capital gains as income. Or, if that would be too much of a burden on people saving for retirement, we could cap the amount of capital gains taxed at the lower rate, at, say, $100,000 a year.

Third, the public sector must ensure greater equity in areas of the most fundamental importance. It will always be the case in a market economy that some will have mansions, art, etc. More troubling is that middle-class students’ ability to attend college has been seriously compromised by increasing tuitions and sharp cutbacks at public universities, and that, over the past generation, a gap has opened between the life expectancy of the affluent and the ordinary.

Yes, subsidies for universities, and even more for community colleges, are an excellent way to help the poor.

I would add a fourth suggestion: real national health insurance, financed through progressive taxation.

All of this, though, would only nibble around the edge of the growing disparity between billionaires and the rest of us. But maybe that wouldn't matter so much if the rest of us had subsidized education and free health care.

Mes Aynak

In Afghanistan, an international team of archaeologists is racing to uncover the ruins of a group of Buddhist monasteries dating to the Kushan Empire of the second to sixth centuries AD. The area, called Mes Aynak, will soon be the site of a giant open pit copper mine being developed by Chinese companies.

In this image of the ridge, you can see the enormous niche that once held a statue of the Buddha, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. The other niches and caves are also human creations, some of them shrines, others copper mines, some copper mines that became shrines.

The Kushan Empire was a cultural crossroads whose wealth came from controlling the silk road and the other caravan routes of central Asia. In these statues you can see the lingering influence of the Greek Bactrian kingdom, left behind by Alexander the Great.

And this tiny idol in its niche shows the influence of India.

Much of the archaeological world is wringing its hands over this, but although I find this loss sad, I can't feel any anger about it. The Chinese are investing $3.5 billion in this mine, by far the largest ever foreign investment in Afghanistan -- unless you count the American and Soviet invasions. Right now the economy of Afghanistan consists essentially of US aid and opium smuggling. If the country is to survive after American troops leave, they have to find some other ways to make money, and right now mining and natural gas drilling seem to be about the only options. The Afghan government delayed the mine for a year to allow archaeology, and much has been uncovered, as you can see in these photographs.