About that Team-Building Exercise

Ahem:

It is important to note that building strong social capital does not require that all colleagues become best friends or even that everyone like one another all the time—this would be impossible. But what does matter is that there be mutual respect and authenticity. Coercing employees into awkward icebreakers or forced bonding activities, like making everyone at a meeting share something about their private lives, only breeds disconnection and mistrust.

I once worked at a state agency that had an annual "retreat." I asked an agency veteran what the retreat was for. "We're supposed to brainstorm about problems in the agency," he said, "but the biggest problem we have is retreats."

What Secret Service Scandal?

As I write, the Secret Service is convulsed by a scandal. There are multiple investigations, including one by Congress, and several people have been fired or forced to resign. Some military personnel are also "implicated." And what, exactly, are they accused of?

drinking heavily, visiting strip clubs and cavorting with women for hire

In other words, of acting like men. This is what men do when they travel on business. If their wives want to get pissed off about visits to prostitutes, that's their business, but I don't see how it's any of mine.

What bothers me is that our government would waste its money "investigating" behavior that is both normal and, in Colombia, perfectly legal, ruining the careers of men who are probably very good at their jobs. To add to the injustice, sources are telling the Post that (of course) this sort of thing has gone on in the Secret Service for a long time, so the people being fired now are only doing what the people firing them have done in the past.

The real scandal is our need to find fault and condemn, and the pleasure we take in outrage.

An Etruscan Bronze Chariot

Excavated from a tomb in Monteleone, Italy, and now in the Metropolitan Museum. Late 6th century BCE. By that time chariots were not used in combat, so this was a prestige vehicle.

Guy Rose: California Impressionism

I've been exploring California Impressionism this week, an artistic movement that I had never heard of until about a month ago. There are a lot of nice painting in this genre, things that would look great on your living room wall, but not many that are striking or memorable. My favorite work so far is this one, The Blue Kimono (1910) by Guy Rose. Rose (1867-1925) was the son of a wealthy rancher and state senator, and he took the high road into art, studying first in California schools and then at the Academie Julienne in Paris. He threw himself into French culture, even living for a while in Giverny just down the road from Monet's villa, where he was a regular guest. He also lived at various times in New York and Rhode Island. In 1914 he moved back to California, where he lived until his death. He was a prolific painter and his works seem to be hot right now, since there are several galleries advertising online to buy his works, with examples of his signature to abet recognition.

These are from this blog post, which has a nice collection of Guy Rose images, none with titles or dates.

View in the San Gabriel Mountains. This seems to be the standard "California Impressionism" image, some softly tinted California hills.

 Blue Pool near Mount Whitney.

 Sunset Glow.

The Sycamores, Pasadena.

Tamarisk Trees in Early Sunlight.

Notre Dame de Grace, Honfleur, France.

The Old Summer House.

Heckuva Meeting

There are good meetings, and then there are those like the one I sat through this morning. My complete notes are above.

Mexican Immigration Ending

As I said a while back, immigration from Latin America will cease to be a problem in America before we ever figure out what we want to do about it. The Post:

A four-decade tidal wave of Mexican immigration to the United States has receded, causing a historic shift in migration patterns as more Mexicans appear to be leaving the United States for Mexico than the other way around, according to a report from the Pew Hispanic Center.

It looks to be the first reversal in the trend since the Depression, and experts say that a declining Mexican birthrate and other factors may make it permanent.

The birthrate in Mexico is now down to the replacement rate. Also, most Mexican migrants to the US come from rural areas, and the Mexican population is now increasingly concentrated in the cities. Throughout the world, one of the major events of the modern period has been a "demographic transition" that goes something like this:

1) death rates fall
2) birth rates start to fall, but more slowly than death rates
3) this leads to rapid population growth
4) the countryside cannot provide work for all of those people, so they leave, either going to cities in their own countries, or emigrating
5) eventually, the falling birth rate catches up with the falling death rate, and population stabilizes
6) emigration effectively ends

Mexico is going through exactly the same series of events as Scotland between 1720 and 1850, and Italy between 1870 and 1920. Some border cities in US may continue to have a large Mexican presence and close ties to Mexico, but you know what? Those areas have had close ties to Mexico since 1848. In the rest of the US, new migrants from Mexico will stop coming in, Mexican immigrants will follow the same path as Irish and Italians, and crotchety conservatives will have to find something else to grouse about.

The Whalers' Secret Weapon

Heather Pringle:

Each July, along the dappled stream banks of Kodiak Island, just off the Alaska coast, a weedy looking wildflower produces a few dark-blue hooded blossoms. There is nothing particularly memorable about the appearance of Aconitum delphinifolium. Its leaves are thin and rather spiky. Its scrawny-looking stem cannot hold the weight of its flowers: its neighbors keep it upright. But this eminently forgettable looking plant, a member of the buttercup family, possesses a dark secret. Aconitum delphinifolium contains a toxin capable of killing one of the world’s largest animals, a 40-ton humpback whale. . . .

To prepare for the hunt, the whalers removed themselves from their villages, sequestering in remote island caves. Far from the curious, they prepared the poison, boiling the roots of the monkshood plant and mixing the fluid with human fat. So deadly was the resulting mixture, they believed, that birds merely flying above could drop dead from the sky.  When the unguent was finally ready, the men applied it to special spearheads fashioned from slate—thin, needle sharp weapons that could penetrate a whale’s thick skin. Then they summoned their spirit helpers, performing intricate rituals in the cave, rituals involving miniature carved wooden kayaks.

I wrote before about the prowess of these shaman whalers, but I just learned about their use of the monkshood poison. Fascinating.

Sticks (A very short story)

By George Saunders, published 1995:

Every year Thanksgiving night we flocked out behind Dad as he dragged the Santa suit to the road and draped it over a kind of crucifix he'd built out of metal pole in the yard. Super Bowl week the pole was dressed in a jersey and Rod's helmet and Rod had to clear it with Dad if he wanted to take the helmet off. On the Fourth of July the pole was Uncle Sam, on Veteran’s Day a soldier, on Halloween a ghost. The pole was Dad's only concession to glee. We were allowed a single Crayola from the box at a time. One Christmas Eve he shrieked at Kimmie for wasting an apple slice. He hovered over us as we poured ketchup saying: good enough good enough good enough. Birthday parties consisted of cupcakes, no ice cream. The first I brought a date over she said: what's with your dad and that pole? and I sat there blinking.

We left home, married,  had children of our own, found the seeds of meanness blooming also within us. Dad began dressing the pole with more complexity and less discernible logic. He draped some kind of fur over it on Groundhog Day and lugged out a floodlight to ensure a shadow. When an earthquake struck Chile he lay the pole on its side and spray painted a rift in the earth. Mom died and he dressed the pole as Death and hung from the crossbar photos of Mom as a baby. We'd stop by and find odd talismans from his youth arranged around the base: army medals, theater tickets, old sweatshirts, tubes of Mom's makeup. One autumn he painted the pole bright yellow. He covered it with cotton swabs that winter for warmth and provided offspring by hammering in six crossed sticks around the yard. He ran lengths of string between the pole and the sticks, and taped to the string letters of apology, admissions of error, pleas for understanding, all written in a frantic hand on index cards. He painted a sign saying LOVE and hung it from the pole and another that said FORGIVE? and then he died in the hall with the radio on and we sold the house to a young couple who yanked out the pole and the sticks and left them by the road on garbage day.

Fingerprints are Bunk

Back in 2004, Itiel Dror hit on a clever way to test the influence of outside information on the judgment of fingerprint experts. He took pairs of prints from the previous work of five fingerprint analysts, prints that they had  testified were certain matches. Then he told the experts that these were the prints from the case of Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield, who was briefly arrested because his prints were thought to match one found during the investigation of the Madrid bombing. It was a perfect set-up: hey, expert, would you mind looking at these prints that the FBI thought matched, but which turned out to be an error? Would you have made that same mistake or not?

Only one of the experts stuck by his previous judgment and said the prints were a match. Three reversed themselves and one said the results were "inconclusive."

Only the last was honest.

How a Real Man Decorates

The living room of amateur fossil hunter Ray Stanford, whose collection of dinosaur footprints made the Post this week. No tiny porcelain teapots or flowered crap in this man cave, just proper decorative elements like fossils, rocks, and dinosaur models. I wonder how he got his wife to go along? Is she part of the tiny minority of women with sensible taste, or does she have her own room somewhere else in the house all done up in flowered wallpaper, lace doilies, and ridiculous geegaws?

One of Stanford's footprints.

And a cast of a baby nodosaur, 5 inches (13 cm) long.

Charles Colson's Prison Conversion

During the scandal known as Watergate, Charles Colson came across as a man who had no virtues but a conniving intellect and an unshakeable loyalty to his bosses. Whatever dirty trick Nixon wanted carried out, Colson was the man to make it happen.

Then he went to prison, and there he experienced one of the most dramatic religious conversions of modern times. He spent the next forty years of his life preaching the gospel to prisoners, hoping that others could find grace behind bars as he did. Now that he has died, we can safely say that his conversion was lifelong. Michael Gerson:

Many wondered at Chuck’s sudden conversion to Christianity. He seemed to wonder at it himself. He spent each day that followed, for nearly 40 years, dazzled by his own implausible redemption. It is the reason he never hedged or hesitated in describing his relationship with Jesus Christ. Chuck was possessed, not by some cause, but by someone. . . .

Prison often figures large in conversion stories. Pride is the enemy of grace, and prison is the enemy of pride. “How else but through a broken heart,” wrote Oscar Wilde after leaving Reading Gaol, “may Lord Christ enter in?” It is the central paradox of Christianity that fulfillment starts in emptiness, that streams emerge in the desert, that freedom can be found in a prison cell. Chuck’s swift journey from the White House to a penitentiary ended a life of accomplishment — only to begin a life of significance. The two are not always the same. The destruction of Chuck’s career freed up his skills for a calling he would not have chosen, providing fulfillment beyond his ambitions. I often heard him quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and mean it: “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life.”

I often heard people of the populist left mock Colson's conversion, a contempt born both from hatred of Nixon's henchmen and distrust of evangelism in any form. It is a terrible mistake, though, to judge Christianity by the hypocrisy of sleazy televangelists, or the improbability of its theology. It does have the power to transform receptive people. And one of its most important ideas is redemption: the belief that no man is so far gone that he cannot turn his life around.

There is a harshness to our age that disturbs me. We are quick to write people off and say that nobody ever changes, that bastards of every sort from Wall Street operators to rapists are scum and deserve to be killed. My greatest fear about an increasingly secular society is that without the Christian insistence that redemption is possible for anyone, we will grow ever more harsh, and lose whatever faith we have left in the potential of even the most degraded life. Redemption does not come for many sinners, but it does come for some, and it is a possibility we should never discount.

Sarcophagi from Deir el Balah, ca. 1300 BC

Deir el Balah, now in the Gaza Strip, was a thriving town in the second millennium BC. It was strongly under the influence of Egyptian civilization and perhaps even an actual outpost of the Pharaoh's empire. So these may have been the coffins of Egyptian officials or soldiers, sent to keep an eye on the client kingdoms of Palestine and the dangerous frontier with the Hittites.

Patrick Blanc's Vertical Gardens

I think these vertical gardens, or green walls as they are sometimes called, are one of the best new design ideas in ages.  One of the top designers is Frenchman Patrick Blanc, who has a nice web site. This is the Musee de Quai Branly in Paris.

A parking garage in Lyon.

Two images of Blanc's Madrid garden, right after it was planted, and after the plants had grown.

A highway overpass in Provence.

A private office in Belgium.

Les Halles, Avignon.

Although I like these, I have to say that I think the environmental benefits are oversold. Yes, more plants are always better, but for the cost of one of these you could plant a lot of trees.

Tsuchiya Rakusan

Woodblock prints, part of a series of 100 based on paintings made in 1925 to 1929. From BibliOdyssey.

Invisible Mothers

From Retronaut (with many more pictures):

This was a practice where the mother, often disguised or hiding, often under a spread, holds her baby tightly for the photographer to insure a sharply focused image.

No Dark Matter Here

Dark matter is a concept, not a thing. When astronomers add up all the mass they can see in a galaxy -- stars, glowing dust -- and compare it to the gravitational effect galaxies have on each other, they find that 90 percent of the mass is "missing." Something we can't see dominates the gravitational universe. We call that "dark matter," but we have no idea what it is.

Now one group of astronomers has undertaken an exhaustive search for dark matter in our own solar system. They measured the gravitational effect that our system has on nearby stars and concluded that what we can see accounts for most if not all of the observed mass. According to their measurements, no more than 20 percent of the matter in our solar system can be "dark."

Some models of dark matter assume that it should be evenly distributed through space, or at least through galactic space. But if this finding holds up and there is no dark matter in our solar system, it's bye-bye to those models and back to wondering if the dark matter is in black holes or invisible clouds, none of which happen to be near us. Or some effect that is only observable at very large distances, or something even weirder.

Our ignorance of the universe is profound.

Punishment

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs,

her shaved head,
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love.
Little adultress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.

--Seamus Heaney

Martian Dust Devil

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured this image of a small twister crossing the Amazonis Planitia region. The core of the twister is about 30 m (100 feet) across.

Why Nutrition Science is Bunk

The people who run the Harvard long-term Nurses' Health Study have been in the news again lately, claiming that red meat will kill you and chocolate will make you thinner. These claims are perfect examples of what is technically known as crap. What the Harvard people keep doing is finding correlations, e.g., the 20% of their subjects who eat the most red meat had a 20% greater chance of dying over the course of the study. Then they make causal claims. Gary Taubes:

I have pointed out that every time that these Harvard researchers had claimed that an association observed in their observational trials was a causal relationship—that food or drug X caused disease or health benefit Y—and that this supposed causal relationship had then been tested in experiment, the experiment had failed to confirm the causal interpretation—i.e., the folks from Harvard got it wrong. Not most times, but every time. . . .

This is an issue about science itself and the quality of research done in nutrition. Science is ultimately about establishing cause and effect. It’s not about guessing. You come up with a hypothesis—force x causes observation y—and then you do your best to prove that it’s wrong. If you can’t, you tentatively accept the possibility that your hypothesis might be right. In the words of Karl Popper, a leading philosopher of science, “The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them.” The bold conjectures, the hypotheses, making the observations that lead to your conjectures… that’s the easy part. The ingenious and severe attempts to refute your conjectures is the hard part. Anyone can make a bold conjecture. (Here’s one: space aliens cause heart disease.) Testing hypotheses ingeniously and severely is the single most important part of doing science.

The problem with observational studies like the  ones from Harvard and UCSD that gave us the bad news about meat and the good news about chocolate, is that the researchers do little of this. The hard part of science is left out, and they skip straight to the endpoint, insisting that their causal interpretation of the association is the correct one and we should probably all change our diets accordingly.

That "scientists" who hold positions at Harvard can get away with spewing garbage like this says something rather disturbing about American academic life.

All You Need to Know about Conservatism

Chris Mooney:

Sure enough, in a recent study of 85 bar patrons, blood alcohol content was related to increased political conservatism for liberals and conservatives alike.

The drinkers still knew whether they were liberal or conservative, of course. But when asked how much they agreed with a variety of statements of political principles—like, “Production and trade should be free of government interference”—higher blood alcohol content was associated with giving more conservative answers.

No, America, Iran is not a Serious Threat

CNN has been polling Americans about possible foreign threats for 30 years now. Back in November, 1985, 32 percent of Americans  viewed the Soviet Union as a "very serious" threat, while 44 percent called it "moderately serious." Considering that the Soviets had 29,000 nuclear weapons, this was perhaps not out of proportion.

This week, CNN released a poll asking the same question about Iran. According to this poll, 48 percent of Americans view Iran as a "very serious" threat, while 33 percent say it is a "moderately serious" threat.

That's right, Americans are more afraid of Iran today than they were of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. For this utter nonsense I mainly blame the Republican Presidential candidates, who competed at every debate to make the most extreme statements about Iran. Their Israeli friends should also take some blame, since they have tried to gin up support for a bombing raid by wildly exaggerating the danger Iran poses to America.

Iran has no nuclear weapons, and even if they succeed in making a few, we will still have about a thousand times as many. True, they could attack some oil tankers and send the price of oil way up, until we finished blasting all their coastal installations into tiny pieces. Or send a few terrorists. But how does that threat compare to the threat of nuclear Armageddon?

Taxes and Space Flight

Today's dose of doublethink comes from Charles Krauthammer, who laments the decline of the American space program:

Is there a better symbol of willed American decline? The pity is not Discovery’s retirement — beautiful as it was, the shuttle proved too expensive and risky to operate — but that it died without a successor. The planned follow-on — the Constellation rocket-capsule program to take humans back into orbit and from there to the moon — was suddenly canceled in 2010. And with that, control of manned spaceflight was gratuitously ceded to Russia and China. . . .

China goes for the glory. Having already mastered launch and rendezvous, the Chinese plan to land on the moon by 2025. They understand well the value of symbols. And nothing could better symbolize China overtaking America than its taking our place on the moon, walking over footprints first laid down, then casually abandoned, by us.

Who cares, you say? What is national greatness, scientific prestige or inspiring the young — legacies of NASA — when we are in economic distress? Okay. But if we’re talking jobs and growth, science and technology, R&D and innovation — what President Obama insists are the keys to “an economy built to last” — why on earth cancel an incomparably sophisticated, uniquely American technological enterprise?

Sure, Charles, that would be great. But we can only afford it by either raising taxes or slashing spending somewhere else. You, as you say every week or so, are deadset opposed to any cuts in military spending, and since your party depends on the votes of people over 65, your friends will never carry through on their plans to cut health care spending. So either come out in favor of higher taxes, or shut up about space.

War and Desecration

Joe Heim ponders images of American soldiers posing with the corpses of dead Afghans:

We’ve seen these images before.

Photographs of victors posing with the corpses of their enemies. Photographs of the vanquished subjected to posthumous humiliation.

We’ve seen these images before. From Iraq and Afghanistan. From Bosnia and Berlin. Rwanda and Darfur. Okinawa and Vietnam.

No matter the war, no matter the perpetrator, what comes across in these photographs is almost always the same: They capture a moment where the humanity of both the living and the dead is absent. 

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's response to these images was, "this is not who we are." That depends, I thought, on who "we" is. If by "we" he meant Homo sapiens, he was flat wrong, because that is exactly who we are.

Or, more accurately, one part of who we are. We are also loving and kind and understanding and capable of empathy even for enemies. But we are brutal and vengeful, as much as we are anything. We are killers, hunters, warriors, and our victories make us crow.

Since the first state that considered itself civilized waged its first war, we have been caught in a dilemma. We want to set limits on war. We want to fight for good reasons, in the spirit of doing right. We know that former enemies can become friends, and that this is essential if we want to avoid the sort of unending warfare between perpetual rivals that troubled so much of our history. Our experience has been that every atrocity makes this ending harder to achieve. It is the gloating, the taunting, and the mocking that keeps hatred alive, much more than the killing. So we want to tame the beast within us that wants to taunt and mock and vaunt its victories.

And yet without that beast, can we fight wars? No doubt some men can, but for many of us war means letting that beast out to rampage. Without that beast -- without the wolf's heads and the face paint and the taking of scalps, without the hateful vocabulary of Krauts and Gooks and Towel-heads, without rage and despite, can any people really wage a long and bitter war?

Modern armies have tried for 300 years to bring the beast to heal. Through repetitive drill, matching uniforms, preaching of "honor," ritual treatment of all bodies, and so on, they have tried to discipline their soldiers and turn their violence into a precise, obedient instrument. It works pretty well, most of the time. But especially when small groups of soldiers are mired for months in the jungle or the mountains, surrounded by foes, always in fear for their lives, the discipline breaks down and the beast comes out.

I am not even sure that this beastliness is always a bad thing. Perhaps it is a defense against the psychological damage wrought by combat; perhaps our modern troubles with PTSD and the suicides of returning soldiers stem partly form our attempts to deny the beast rather than to honor it.

I am certain, though, that as long as there are wars, there will be atrocities. To pretend otherwise -- to pretend that war can be clean and neat and moral -- is a lie. If our goal is to avoid atrocity, the only answer is peace.

Votive Idols of Ancient Sardinia

These bronze figurines were left as offerings at shrines in Sardinia between 1000 and 700 BC. Above, mother with child.

The "Chief of the Herdsmen." Several images of this type are known, and some scholars think this is a king, prince, or priest. But nobody really knows.

Two archers, still joined by a root that grew through the pit where they had been deposited and separated them from a large bronze vessel.

A stag.  All from the George Ortiz Collection.

Joan of Arc

By Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Up for auction at Sotheby's; could be yours for half a million or so.

The New Apocalypse

Pascal Bruckner on predictions of an environmental apocalypse:

The Christian apocalypse saw itself as a hopeful revelation of the coming of God’s kingdom. Today’s has nothing to offer. There is no promise of redemption; the only hope is that those human beings who repent of their errors may escape the chaos. . . .

Around the turn of the twenty-first century, a paradigm shift in our thinking took place: we decided that the era of revolutions was over and that the era of catastrophes had begun. The former had involved expectation, the hope that the human race would proceed toward some goal. But once the end of history was announced, the Communist enemy vanquished, and, more recently, the War on Terror all but won, the idea of progress lay moribund. What replaced the world’s human future was the future of the world as a material entity. The long list of emblematic victims—Jews, blacks, slaves, proletarians, colonized peoples—was likewise replaced, little by little, with the Planet, the new paragon of all misery. No longer were we summoned to participate in a particular community; rather, we were invited to identify ourselves with the spatial vessel that carried us, groaning.

A warming earth might be very bad for us, and it might lead to the extinction of many species of plants and animals, but it is no kind of threat either to the planet or our civilization. Apocalyptic thinking is a bad habit we should all guard against.

A Pit Full of Broken Buddhas

Near the ancient Chinese city of Ye, archaeologists have found a pit containing about 3,000 statues of the Buddha. They are about 1,500 years old, and many are broken. Some of China's rulers fought to keep Buddhism out of China, before it was officially embraced under the Tang Dynasty (618-907), and this pit is likely the remnant of some anti-Buddhism campaign:

The Buddha statues—most of which are made of white marble and limestone and many of which are broken—could date back to the Eastern Wei and Northern Qi dynasties (A.D. 534 to 577), experts say. The statues—discovered during a dig outside of Ye, the ancient capital of the Eastern Wei and Northern Qi dynasties—may have been rounded up and buried after the fall of the Northern Qi dynasty by later emperors in an attempt to purge the country of Buddhism.