A Big Problem with DNA Evidence

Erin Murphy at The New Republic:

In 2009, a horrific murder occurred in a place rarely associated with violence: a Yale graduate scientific laboratory. On what was to be her wedding day, a graduate student’s body was found head down within a small mechanical chase behind a wall in the laboratory. As she fell, her underwear snagged and entangled on a vent pipe that spanned the length of the chase. Extensive DNA samples were taken from the victim, her clothing, and spaces around the chase. Testing revealed two profiles, one of which matched a co-worker later implicated in the crime through other evidence. But a second person’s DNA was also found, ominously recovered in significant quantities from samples that included the waistband of the victim’s underwear. When the profile was submitted to the DNA database, a match returned the name of a convicted offender living nearby.

Further investigation, however, turned up something mysterious. The database match suspect had died two years prior to the Yale attack. Stumped, investigators first ruled out an identical twin or other relative, as well as laboratory contamination errors. Ultimately, however, they learned that years earlier the offender had worked in construction. Specifically, he had spent one long, hot summer building the very mechanical chase in which the victim was found—and he had even made errors the first time around that required him to effectively rebuild it a second time. Even though the victim did not encounter that chase until years later, the fact that it was a space that was closed from ordinary traffic or regular cleaning, coupled with the building’s strict temperature and environmental regulation (as a result of its role as a scientific lab) helped preserve in pristine the large quantity of DNA the worker had left behind as he sweated in that space during the construction.

We're getting so good at finding DNA that even a fallen bead of sweat can lead to a DNA match. I have also pondered how easy it would be to frame somebody for a crime by getting hold of some of their hair, sweat and skin cells and strewing it liberally around the crime scene. Has this been done in a movie yet?

Spectacular Mycenaean Tomb Uncovered in Greece

Near the Mycenaean site of Pylos in Greece, archaeologists have excavated a spectacular tomb dating to around 1500 BCE. It contains only a single person, quite different from the family tombs more common in the Mycenaean age.

He lies with a yard-long bronze sword and a remarkable collection of gold rings, precious jewels and beautifully carved seals. Archaeologists expressed astonishment at the richness of the find and its potential for shedding light on the emergence of the Mycenaean civilization, the lost world of Agamemnon, Nestor, Odysseus and other heroes described in the epics of Homer.

“Probably not since the 1950s have we found such a rich tomb,” said James C. Wright, the director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Seeing the tomb “was a real highlight of my archaeological career,” said Thomas M. Brogan, the director of the Institute for Aegean Prehistory Study Center for East Crete, noting that “you can count on one hand the number of tombs as wealthy as this one.”

Wow.

Ivory comb and bronze mirror.

Necklace, and detail.

What makes this tomb important as well as amazing is its date. It is generally thought that Mycenaean civilization arose on the Greek mainland in response to a stimulus provided by Minoan civilization on Crete, which is a thousand years older. Here we have what appears to be a member of a budding Mycenaean warrior elite, buried with a fortune in Minoan goods. Including symbols of authority like this stone seal, identical to the ones used by officials at Knossos:

“This is a transformative moment in the Bronze Age,” Dr. Brogan said.

The grave, in Dr. Wright’s view, lies “at the date at the heart of the relationship of the mainland culture to the higher culture of Crete” and will help scholars understand how the state cultures that developed in Crete were adopted into what became the Mycenaean palace culture on the mainland.

Warriors probably competed for status as stratified societies formed on the mainland. This developing warrior society liked to show off its power through high-quality goods, like Cretan seal stones and gold cups — “lots of bling,” as Dr. Wright put it. “Perhaps we can theorize that this site was that of a rising chiefdom,” he said.

And look at this, another gold signet ring like the ones I wrote about a few weeks ago. Since there seems to be no doubt that this ring came from the tomb, and since it depicts a bull and acrobats, that means there is at least one 100% authentic artifact from the Minoan world depicting bull dancers. Which makes it more likely that the other examples, dismissed as fakes by some, are real.

The story of the tomb's discovery is also fascinating for anyone who enjoys such tales:

The grave was discovered this spring, on May 18, by Jack L. Davis and Sharon R. Stocker, a husband-and-wife team at the University of Cincinnati who have been excavating at Pylos for 25 years.

The top of the warrior’s shaft grave lies at ground level, seemingly so easy to find that it is quite surprising the tomb lay intact for 35 centuries.

“It is indeed mind boggling that we were first,” Dr. Davis wrote in an email. “I’m still shaking my head in disbelief. So many walked over it so many times, including our own team.”

“I was very pessimistic about this,” Dr. Davis said, thinking that the grave was probably some medieval construction, or that even if it was prehistoric it would almost certainly have been robbed. But a few days later, he received a text message from the supervising archaeologist saying, “I hit bronze.”

What he and Dr. Stocker had stumbled on was a very rare shaft grave, 5 feet deep, 4 feet wide and 8 long. Remarkably, the burial was intact apart from a one-ton stone, probably once the lid of the grave, which had fallen in and crushed the wooden coffin beneath.

The coffin has long since decayed, but still remaining are the bones of a man about 30 to 35 years old and lying on his back. Placed to his left were weapons, including a long bronze sword with an ivory hilt clad in gold and a gold-hilted dagger. On his right side were four gold rings with fine Minoan carvings and some 50 Minoan seal stones carved with imagery of goddesses and bull jumpers. “I was just stunned by the quality of the carving,” Dr. Wright said, noting that the objects “must have come out of the best workshops of the palaces of Crete.”

An ivory plaque carved with a griffin, a mythical animal that protected goddesses and kings, lay between the warrior’s legs. The grave contained gold, silver and bronze cups.

What an amazing discovery.

Mural by David de la Mano and Pablo S. Herrero

More here.

About that IRS Scandal

The LA Times reports on the end of a manufactured scandal:

The Justice Department informed Congress on Friday that it will not file criminal charges in the IRS’ mishandling of applications for tax exemption by conservative tea party groups.

“Our investigation uncovered substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment, and institutional inertia, leading to the belief by many tax-exempt applicants that the IRS targeted them based on their political affairs,” the letter said. “But poor management is not a crime.”

Revelations by the IRS inspector general that a Cincinnati-based unit of the IRS was targeting groups that applied for tax-exempt status for burdensome reviews based on their use of such words as “tea party” or “patriots” caused a furor. Republicans demanded that the unit's director, Lois Lerner, and the others be investigated.

Assistant Atty. Gen. Peter J. Kadzik, who is in charge of congressional relations, told House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) that “we are closing our investigation and will not seek any criminal charges.”

He said the nearly two-year investigation by Justice and the FBI included more than 100 witness interviews and more than a million pages of IRS documents. “Not a single IRS employee reported any allegation, concern or suspicion that the handling of tax-exempt applications – or any other IRS function – was motivated by political bias, discriminatory intent, or corruption," Kadzik said.

He said Justice had specifically absolved Lerner, who resigned over the allegations, of criminal liability, and found in fact that she was the first official to recognize the problem and to try and correct it.

One important thing to remember is that all of these groups actually are violating the law. They are chartered as 503(c) entities, which are not supposed to engage in electoral politics, and since their whole purpose is to influence elections they really should be audited by the IRS.

In Which I React as an Old Fud to a Story about Campus Sex

You probably wouldn't believe me if I tried to summarize the essay, so if you're really curious, read with wonder as Rebecca Traister interviews college women just discovering that consensual sex can still be bad. Not only that, but many men are jerks. They seem mystified that nobody ever told them about this.

Maybe they should have asked somebody over 22?

The Tea Party Scam

Good reporting from Eric Lipton and Jennifer Steinhauer on the ways conservative “Action Groups” are exploiting voter anger:

The petitions that started surfacing online over a year ago were as incendiary as they were urgent, begging recipients to sign up to “Boot Boehner,” “Dump McConnell,” “Drop a Truth-Bomb on Kevin McCarthy” and “Fire Paul Ryan.”

The calls to oust Republican leaders in Congress did not come from Democrats. They came from conservative websites and bloggers who have helped stoke a grass-roots rebellion to make Congress more conservative, a fevered continuation of the six-year Tea Party movement.

But these politically charged appeals to conservatives around the country were often accompanied by a solicitation for money, and the ultimate beneficiaries, records suggest, are the consultants who created the campaigns rather than the causes they are promoting.

One example:

Larry Ward, the founder of Constitutional Rights PAC, defended the move to derail the ascension of Mr. Ryan, calling it a worthy goal. “Politics is supposed to be bloody. It is supposed to be a battle of will,” Mr. Ward said. “And the one who can get the American people siding with them is the one who wins.”

But Mr. Ward also has a financial stake in the fight. He runs Political Media, a Washington-based firm that will charge Constitutional Rights PAC a fee for sending out the blast email with the dual purpose of asking conservatives to help dump Mr. Ryan and to donate to Mr. Ward’s political action committee.

“Help us fund the fight by making an emergency donation of $30, $50 or even $100 today,” the email said, even though records show that Mr. Ward’s PAC spends every dollar it gets on consultants, mailings and fund-raising — making no donations to candidates. Mr. Ward defended his use of his own firm, saying he gave his PAC a discount on his company’s regular service charges.

Nauseating. And it isn't just ordinary schmucks who are being exploited; the Washington Post had some great reporting after the 2012 election showing how much of the money spent by billionaires like Sheldon Adelson ended up in the pockets of political consultants and advertising men. These guys are making money hand over fist. In the 90s the huge mansions being built around Washington were mainly for high tech entrepreneurs and real estate tycoons, but now most of them belong to political guys.

It makes me wonder. How much of the anger and fear in American politics is being created by these consultants for their own purposes? I mean, if these guys just pocket the money, that's disgusting but not especially important. But if it is in the interest of a whole class of well-connected people -- political consultants, advertising agents, talk radio guys, Fox News -- to keep the anger boiling, can they make that happen? Or are they just riding a wave that exists quite apart from them? After all, paranoid politics has been around for 250 years in America. I don't know, but it gives me pause.

It also makes me wonder if angry Tea Party types who worship entrepreneurship and scorn the common good are more prone to engage in this sort of thing than others. Are there Democratic or neocon groups doing the same thing?

Fusion Whack-a-Mole

Article in the Times today on the new wave of private fusion ventures that I have written about. The author, tech journalist Dino Grandoni, seems as confused by the whole business as I am. On the one hand there are all these ambitious engineers with tens of millions in start-up money from famous investors, promising to save the world. On the other, their promises sound exactly like the ones we have been hearing for forty years. As to whether these guys really have new ideas:

Critics in the nuclear physics field say it is unlikely start-ups will succeed with these alternative approaches.

“They just keep pounding on the same dead horse,” said Edward C. Morse, a nuclear physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. “What happens in fusion is that the same ideas pop up every two decades. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole.”

Solange Knopf

Solange Knopf is a self-taught Belgian artist born in 1957. Her gallery says this about her:

Like many others of her generation she dipped in and out of the world counterculture of the 60’s and 70’s and travelled the globe (India, Afghanistan, Iran, Morocco). Circumstances led to some personal tragedies and drawing became a way of assuaging pain, depression and confusion, confronting her own and other’s demons to give her life a focus.

Above, Beyond the Darkness I, 2013.

Le chant du tambour, 2015.

Masquerades, 2015.

Spirit Codex No. 23, 2014.

Beyond the Darkness No. 10. 2014.

Spirit Codex No. 18, 2014. I suppose one could dismiss these as mishmashes of Austrialian and Indonesian imagery by a mad white woman, but I like them a lot.

Dance of the Spirits, 2015.

The New Dark Lord

Reuters:

A statue of Vladimir Lenin in Odessa, Ukraine, has been refashioned into Darth Vader. A Ukrainian artist, Alexander Milov, whose work appeared at Burning Man this year, transformed the statue in response to recent decommunization laws, which require the removal of Communist symbols in Ukraine.

Something about this transformation strikes me as perfect. Milov said that he thought it was appropriate to use an icon of  American pop culture, since "this seems to be more enduring than the Soviet ideal."

Fall in the Garden

We had our first frost last weekend, two weeks ahead of schedule, and I feel a little cheated. But out in the garden today planting tulip bulbs I found lots of color.

My wonderful wild mums.

Sometimes after frost the surviving marigolds have a spectacular glow.

Buried with other People's Heads

Fascinating archaeological news from California. At a site called Marsh Creek, a cemetery has been found that contains at least 480 burials dating to between 4,300 and 2,950 years ago. Fifteen of those burials were weird: seven were missing their heads, and eight were buried with extra skulls. The extra skulls showed no evidence of trauma, so it doesn't look like they were taken in battle.

Two of the burials contained, not complete extra skulls, but polished skull caps:

Burial 107 is an adult male aged between 35 and 45 at the time of his death. He was buried in with his head pointing south in a pit with two other males, and aside from a partially healed jawbone fracture, there was no evidence of physical trauma on the skeleton. In his grave the researchers found a skull cap - or calotte - covered in red ochre, placed next to his right arm. The calotte was taken from an adolescent or young adult, had been cut near part of the skull known as the superciliary arches, or brow bone, and it had 'highly polished edges.' The archaeologists also discovered a pointed bone fragment and a serpentine phallic charmstone fragment in this grave.

As to who these skulls belonged to, nobody seems to know. Elemental analysis of the bones suggests that all the skeletons and skulls came from the same general area, so the simplest explanation would be that they are all from the same community. Making skull caps out of your relatives would be a little unusual, but the Toltecs and Aztecs did much stranger things with their own relations.

William Randolph Hearst's Monasteries

Newspaperman William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) was for a while insanely rich. He spent his money profligately in every direction, buying property, houses, and art. Like some of the other big Gilded Age collectors, he especially liked buying, not just objects, but whole rooms full of objects and even better whole buildings. I was drawn to this story by the picture above, supposed to show Hearst on the wharf in San Francisco around 1925, inspecting a shipload of medieval stones.

So I started work on what I thought would be a quick little post about Hearst's mad buying spree and the fate of these particular stones. I discovered, though, that Hearst bought so much stuff that it is difficult to say which building might be in these crates. Nor is that even Hearst himself in the picture; most likely it is one of his architects, Walter Steilberg. Also, after 1929 Hearst's fortunes suffered badly, and he started selling off his collections even faster then he had acquired them. His two biggest acquisitions, two whole monasteries, were not re-assembled in his lifetime.

Much of Hearst's collection ended up in his mad California castle, including the facade of a Roman temple, a 3rd century mosaic, two dozen antique fireplaces, and so on. The dining room (above) has a sixteenth-century ceiling from an Italian monastery, a giant fifteenth-century French fireplace, several sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries, and the walls are lined with fifteenth-century Spanish choir stalls.

So for Hearst, at least, buying a whole monastery was not much of a stretch. The first one he purchased was St. Bernard de Clairvaux, built between 1133 and 1141 at Sacramenia, near Segovia in northern Spain. Hearst bought the cloisters and several outbuildings in 1925, and the stones were individually numbered and then shipped to America in 11,000 crates. Because of Hearst's mounting financial troubles and a loss of interest in the project, things soon stalled:

The massive crates remained in a warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, for 26 years. One year after Hearst’s' death in 1952, they were purchased by two entrepreneurs for use as a tourist attraction. It took 19 months and the equivalent of nearly $20 million dollars (in today’s currency) to put the Monastery back together. In 1953 Time magazine called it “the biggest jigsaw puzzle in history.”

In 1964, Colonel Robert Pentland, Jr, who was a multimillionaire banker, philanthropist and benefactor of many Episcopal churches, purchased the Cloisters and presented them to the Bishop of Florida. Today the parish Church of St. Bernard de Clairvaux is an active and growing congregation in the Episcopal Diocese of Southeast Florida. Services are held on Sundays and weekdays in both English and Spanish.

It seems typical of Hearst that having lost interest in his first monastery, which was sitting in a New York warehouse, he then bought another:

Santa María de Óvila is a former Cistercian monastery built in Spain beginning in 1181 on the Tagus River near Trillo, Guadalajara, about 90 miles (140 km) northeast of Madrid. During prosperous times over the next four centuries, construction projects expanded and improved the small monastery. Its fortunes declined significantly in the 18th century, and in 1835 it was confiscated by the Spanish government and sold to private owners who used its buildings to shelter farm animals.

American publisher William Randolph Hearst bought parts of the monastery in 1931 with the intention of using its stones in the construction of a grand and fanciful castle at Wyntoon, California, but after some 10,000 stones were removed and shipped, they were abandoned in San Francisco for decades. These stones are now in various locations around California: the old church portal has been reassembled at the University of San Francisco, and the chapter house is being reassembled by Trappist monks at the Abbey of New Clairvaux in Vina, California. Other stones are serving as simple decorative elements in Golden Gate Park's botanical garden.

The picture above shows what was left of the monastery after Hearst's men had taken away what they wanted.

Above, some of the stones in Golden Gate Park.

The monastery entrance in Spain and at the University of San Francisco.

Many of the stones that Hearst purchased came from the monastery chapter house. When he heard about this, the abbot of the Trappist Abbey of New Clairvaux in California thought they should be reassembled to become part of his monastery. He first came up with this plan in 1955, but it actually took until 2003 for this to happen, with funding from the Hearst foundation. Only about half of the stones in the reconstructed chapter house are original, but the rest were carved by stone masons to match the medieval patterns.

 

And so my struggle to find out about that one photograph comes to an end, after a circuitous but fascinating journey.

Christopher Lasch on Neurosis and Society

I've been reading Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism, a fascinating but maddening book. Sometimes it is bewildering how hard he works to make everything about the 1970s seem worse than things used to be, but he does have a lot to say about both the present and the past.

One section that greatly interested me was about how the practice of psychiatry changed over the course of the twentieth century. Freud and his contemporaries treated upper middle class Europeans who developed hysterical symptoms as a way of coping with their rigidly repressed lives. Unable to otherwise deal with the sense that their every word and gesture had to be sufficiently respectable for their respectable families, they lost control of their bodies and their voices, falling into defensive patterns they could not then escape. This was especially true for those who had suffered some unspeakable harm; Freud famously had so many female patients who had been sexually abused as children that he decided they must be making it up.

In the fifties, psychiatrists noticed that they were no longer seeing many such patients. Instead they had patients with vague depression and anxiety, or with the constellation of symptoms -- "unstable moods, behavior, and relationships" -- that came to be called Borderline Personality Disorder. To Lasch this is a sign of the way our society had changed. Instead of too much rigidity and repression, the post-World War II world suffered from other woes, and the symptoms of neurotic patients changed in response.

After two-and-half Lasch books this month I was despairing of ever finding a clear statement of what, exactly, he thought was wrong with the modern world. I finally found this passage, embedded in his discussion of parenting. After going over all the faddish approaches to parenting that swept through psychology over the course of the twentieth century, all of them based on the assumption that without expert advice parents are doomed to ruin their children, Lasch wrote:

It is too late, however, to call for a revival of the patriarchal family or even of the "companionate" family that replaced it. The "transfer of functions," as it is known in the antiseptic jargon of the social sciences -- in reality, the deterioration of child care -- has been at work for a long time, and many of its consequences appear to be irreversible. The first step in the process, already taken in some societies in the late eighteenth century, was the segregation of children from the adult world, partly as a deliberate policy, partly as the unavoidable result of the withdrawal of many work processes from the home. As the industrial system monopolized production, work became less and less visible to the child. Fathers could no longer bring their work home or teach children the skills that went into it. At a later stage in this alienation of labor, management's monopolization of technical skills, followed at an even later stage by the socialization of childrearing techniques, left parents with little but love to transmit to their offspring; and love without discipline is not enough to assure the generational continuity on which every culture depends. Instead of guiding the child, the older generation now struggles to "keep up with the kids," to master their incomprehensible jargon, and even to imitate their dress and manners in the hope of preserving a youthful appearance and outlook.

These changes, which are inseparable from the whole development of modern industry, have made it more and more difficult for children to form strong psychological identifications with their parents. The invasion of the family by industry, the mass media, and the agencies of socialized parenthood has subtly altered the quality of the parent-child connection. It has created an ideal of perfect parenthood while destroying parents' confidence in their ability to perform the most elementary functions of childrearing. The American mother, according to Geoffrey Gorer, depends so heavily on experts that she "can never have the easy, almost unconscious, self-assurance of the mother of more patterned societies, who is following ways she knows unquestioningly to be right."

The basic problem with modern life, to Lasch, is that modernization has destroyed our sense of competence. Imagine by way of contrast a pioneer family, where both husband and wife feel confident in their ability to master their world, where both are versed in essential skills that feel real and vital: farming, making clothing, preparing food, raising children. They neither seek nor want expert guidance in how to lead their lives. They know who they are and feel proud of it; they feel they are doing as God commands. Their ideas about what they want and need are influenced by how they grew up and how their neighbors live, not by advertising or mass media. Because they feel secure in who they are, they willingly participate in society as equals with their neighbors. Their political views are of a piece with their philosophies of life, and they are neither intimidated by authority nor influenced by political advertising men. They feel in control of their lives and their fates, partly because they accept so much of what happens to them and what is as the will of God. Children grow up admiring their parents' competence and believing that adulthood means becoming like the adults they know.

We, by contrast, feel incompetent, lost, overwhelmed by global events far beyond our understanding. Our practical skills have atrophied, leaving us unable to make or repair any of the tools we depend on for living. Our computer, phones, refrigerators and cars are complete mysteries to us. Our jobs feel anything but real and vital. Career success depends, not on technical knowledge, but on navigating the corporate bureaucracy and creating the image of a winner. Constantly told by experts of every sort that we can do nothing by ourselves, we sink into indecision and anxiety, unwilling to trust our own judgment. We get our ideas about what is and ought to be from television and the internet and so are constantly exposed to unreasonable models of wealth and celebrity that make us feel like failures. With no faith in God and no reliance on tradition, we have no reason to suppose that our lives are good lives or our a society a good one, so we tend to despise everything that we have and are. Our political ideas are dominated by conspiracy theories, since nothing that happens makes sense to us on any other basis.

We respond to this sense of incompetence not with modesty, but by doubling down on our self-assertion. The model of what Lasch has in mind might be a retiree living on a government pension who reacts to his lack of independence by joining the Tea Party and talking constantly about self-reliance and entrepreneurship; unable to admit his own dependence on others, he channels his anxiety into angry accusations that others are not carrying their own weight. This is what Lasch means by narcissism. Without any proper, well-founded sense of self-mastery, we substitute loud proclamations of our own importance and virtue. Aware that we lack something but unsure what it is or how to get it, we become obsessed with the inner workings of our own minds. Constantly gazing inward, we lose sight of the outside world -- what matters most to us about anything is how it makes us feel. Our social interactions are poisoned by our sense of weakness and failure; we see the social world as a field of struggle where there are winners and losers, so we strive to be among the winners rather than just to make friends. The only way we can imagine to assuage our nagging sense of inadequacy is "success" -- money, fame, the corner office, the beautiful spouse. With no other signposts of achieving a good life, we focus on numbers; who has the most money, the most Facebook friends, the most page views on his blog. But none of it works, because no matter how much we earn and how many lavish trips we take to the far corners of the world, we never really feel that the path we have taken is the right one.

Lasch was too good a historian to mistake his model of nineteenth-century life for the real thing. But he certainly believed that we had lost something vital that our ancestors used to have. As a quasi-Freudian he believed that our personalities are formed largely within the family, and therefore that the major changes he saw in the world must derive from changes within the family, changes that we was sure must be for the worse.

I am ambivalent. My understanding of the past does include a sense that most work used to be more real and fulfilling than bureaucracy, but on the other hand people had lots of other worries: smallpox, wolves, frequent low-level warfare, drought, flood, famine. Do our lives really feel more out of control than theirs did? Now we have experts telling us how to do everything; without experts they regularly consulted oracles and shamans for some sort of guidance. What Lasch says about changes in the parent-child relationship interest me, but then in old Europe and colonial America many thousands of people hated their families and fled as far away as they could. So I am not sure that Lasch's model is the right one.

On the other hand millions of us really do suffer from vague anxiety and depression, and this strikes me as a phenomenon that needs some kind of explanation.

Standing by their Graves; or, the Morality of Rescue

On Thursday, the first American was killed in Iraq since our withdrawal in 2011. This was Sergeant Joshua Wheeler, 39, of Oklahoma, one of the special forces "operators" we sent to help the Kurds fight the Islamic State. Defense Secretary Ash Carter held a press conference yesterday to explain what happened:

Wheeler was killed in a raid by U.S. and Kurdish commandos on an Islamic State base in Hawijah, Kirkuk province, following a request from the Kurdistan Regional Government. About 70 hostages, including dozens of civilians, were freed. The Pentagon said they faced imminent execution.

Carter added he made the decision to aid the Kurdish troops after receiving actionable intelligence the hostages faced imminent execution. He said the hostages, who have since been debriefed, had told them that their graves had been dug.

“We had seen the graves beforehand,” Carter said.

Here’s how the Pentagon described the U.S. role on Thursday: “The U.S. provided helicopter lift and accompanied Iraqi Peshmerga forces to the compound.” The Peshmerga came under fire, Wheeler was injured, and died later, the Defense Department said.

On Friday, Carter provided more details about Wheeler’s actions: “He ran toward the gunfire,” he said.

He said he was proud of Wheeler’s actions and called them courageous. “It wasn’t part of the plan, but it’s something that he did,” he said.

Since I am on principle opposed to the U.S. charging around the world trying to right wrongs with bombs and bullets, this obviously presents a problem for me. I think we can all understand what Wheeler did, and even admire it. He saw 70 civilian hostages slated for execution by one of the world's most evil regimes, their graves already dug, and rushed to help. The army generally disapproves of soldiers freelancing around the battlefield outside the rules of engagement, but even the Defense Secretary offered no criticism of Wheeler's conduct. Nor is anyone likely to criticize the Secretary for ordering his men to assist the Kurds in this operation. Presented with an aerial photograph of the 70 open graves, how could he not?

But. The Islamic State only exists because we overthrew Saddam Hussein, a truly monstrous man, with the blood of tens of thousands on his hands. I admit that removing him was a gain for the world, but that has to be balanced against the 120,000 Iraqis and more than 4,000 Americans killed in the war that followed, the trillion dollars spent, the million refugees. And the rise of the Islamic State, the bastard child of Islamic fundamentalism and American shock and awe.

Take a look at Libya, where the U.S., France and Britain intervened to prevent what they thought was an inevitable massacre of people we admired, civilian protesters in the vanguard of the Arab Spring. It strikes me as an almost exact parallel to the choice faced by Sergeant Wheeler; seeing an atrocity about to unfold, he charged in, and so did Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary. And then once we had defended the virtuous protesters, we decided to help them rid themselves of the wicked regime that threatened them, a government guilty of manifold crimes including bombing at least one airliner. And now Libya is a ruin. Thousands have been killed in the civil war that followed Qaddafi's fall, and hundreds of thousands have been made into refugees. Was it worth it?

What about the world's most evil government, in North Korea? Nobody seriously doubts that we could overthrow that regime if we decided to, and its disappearance would be a greater boon even than the fall of Saddam. But how many would be killed? How many lives ruined? What would the cost be of putting Korea back together?

I feel like a cad, but I have to say: sometimes it is better to let few innocent people be murdered than to charge to the rescue without having any idea what the eventual consequences might be.

Jo Daemen, The Sacred Flame

Illustrations from a modern fairy tale, by Dutch artist and engraver Jo Daemen, 1927. Source.

Isabelle Bacher, Solar Eclipse in Spitzbergen

From National Geographic.

Do we want to be remembered as a bomber of weddings and hospitals?

Lincoln Chafee withdrew from the presidential race today. His parting shot was a call for a less belligerent foreign policy:

When I was a senator, a general from the Pentagon testified before the Foreign Relations Committee on global military powers. I asked him who was second to the U.S. in military might? He thought for a bit and said, “probably the U.K.” Yes that was a few years ago but the point remains true: no real rival to the United States exists when it comes to total weaponry and deployment potential.

We make Virginia class submarines in Rhode Island and I’ve been on an overnight patrol. What a phenomenal piece of technology and craftsmanship – a machine bristling with the most advanced power imaginable. Submarines are just one instrument in our staggeringly efficient arsenal of war. And yet we are sinking ever deeper and deeper into an endless morass in the Middle East and North Africa. People keep dying, and peace seems further and further away. It’s evident that all this military power isn’t working for us right now.

Let me share a story from DaNang, Viet Nam. DaNang – that city has so many memories for my generation. But just this summer, former Viet Cong and ex-American G.I.’s were laughing, eating, drinking and celebrating the Fourth of July together. The article quoted Pete Peterson, a former Air Force pilot who spent six and a half years in a Hanoi prison camp after he was shot down. Later he served as Ambassador to Viet Nam in the 1990’s. He said now Viet Nam and the United States have so much in common. After all the death and devastation during that horrible war, why did we do it, he was asked. He said, “I have thought about this for a long time. I’m convinced that the war could have been averted had we made the effort to understand the politics of the place. … had we made the effort to understand the politics of the place.”

Ladies and gentleman, from what I’ve heard none of the Republicans running for president want to understand anything about the Middle East and North Africa. Instead they prefer to espouse more bellicosity, more saber rattling and more blind macho posturing. . . .

Do we want to be remembered as a bomber of weddings and hospitals? Or do we want to be remembered as Peacemakers, as pioneers of a more harmonious world?

The Protein Fountain of Youth

Sixty years ago some ghoulish scientists connected the circulatory systems of old and young mice and discovered that the young blood made the older mice look and act young again.

Ever since then, physiologists have been searching for the magic factor that might be the cause of this remarkable effect. Last year a team led by two prominent American scientists, Amy Wagers and Richard Lee, announced that they had isolated one causal agent: a protein called GDF11. Wagers, Lee and colleagues

reported that blood levels of GDF11 drop in mice as the animals get older and that injecting old mice with GDF11 can partially reverse age-related thickening of the heart. . . . Wagers and collaborators also reported that GDF11 can rejuvenate the rodents’ muscles and brains.

But the first teams to attempt replication of this result could not confirm it:

The Novartis group concluded from a different assay that GDF11 levels in blood actually rise with age in rats and people. And in their lab, GDF11 injections inhibited muscle regeneration in young mice.

Today's news is that Wagers et al. are sticking to their guns:

To back up their earlier results, Wagers and collaborators again show in the new paper that daily GDF11 injections can shrink heart muscle in both old and new mice. 

But wait, there's more:

But this time they note another observation: The mice also lost weight.

I expect a black market in clandestine GDF11 to spring up overnight. Shadowy guys in the dark corners of bars and clubs will carry GDF11 instead of cocaine or oxycontin, crazy minor celebrities will go on talk shows to talk about their miracle cure, dubious doctors in Mexico and the Philippines will start offering tourists treatments with what they claim is GDF11, and eventually pharmaceutical companies will bring a drug to market and earn billions. I remains dubious, though, that it will really add years to anyone's life.

Meanwhile, at the House Benghazi Hearings

The more I watch and read, the less I understand the whole Benghazi obsession. It seems Hillary feels the same way.