Biden's Strategy Follows Conor Lamb's

In 2018, Conor Lamb won a special election in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, a district Trump won by 20 points. Joe Biden knows the politics of Pennsylvania as well as anybody – he comes from the part of northern Delaware that is essentially a suburb of Philadelphia – and he campaigned for Lamb when nobody thought Lamb could win. According to Reid Epstein in the Times, Biden's strategy is a duplicate of the one used by Lamb:

Mr. Lamb’s victory showed Democrats how to prevail in Republican territory during the Trump era: focus on kitchen-table issues; inspire defections from college-educated suburban voters — especially women — who had been core Republican voters for decades; and offer conservative-leaning voters a sober, reassuring alternative to a chaotic president.

It helped that Mr. Lamb was a Marine veteran and a former federal prosecutor — a résumé of service to the country that he and fellow Democrats used to contrast themselves with Mr. Trump and Republicans who came from the business world.

Mr. Biden has likewise used his decades of experience in the Senate and eight years as vice president to highlight his own public service, while reminding audiences that he regularly ranked among the least-wealthy senators. . . .

“There are a lot of people who voted for me in 2018, not so much for reasons of policy or party, but just reasons of change,” Mr. Lamb said from atop a picnic table during an outdoor interview this past week in a park near his home in Mt. Lebanon, a suburb. “People were unsatisfied with how things were going, and I promised that I would do my job differently than the guy you had before me. And I think that’s what Vice President Biden is basically doing.”

When Mr. Lamb won in March 2018, he served notice for Democrats aiming to wrest control of the House and give the party control of at least one lever of the federal government. The answer to defeating Trump-aligned Republican candidates was not to emphasize the president’s erratic, divisive tenure in the Oval Office. Instead Democratic candidates focused narrowly on policies affecting voters’ lives, like protecting provisions in the Affordable Care Act and casting Republicans as a party pandering to corporations and the very rich, attacking the 2017 tax cut that Republican Party leaders had intended to use as the tent pole achievement for their midterm campaigns.

During his remarks at Mr. Lamb’s rally, Mr. Biden called the tax cut “obscene.” . . .

In Congress, Mr. Lamb is a rank-and-file Democrat who has not rocked the boat or voted against the party’s leadership on any significant issues. At home, he’s cultivated an image of a Democrat focused on Pennsylvania jobs above all else — a sentiment he says Mr. Biden has echoed.

“No matter what side of an issue my party was on when I went to Washington, I would be fighting for their jobs no matter what,” Mr. Lamb said.

One reason Biden generated so little enthusiasm among Democratic activists during the primaries was that he refused to spend his time attacking Trump's character or corruption and would not sign up for big new policies like Medicare for All. The activists wanted someone who would match Trump insult for insult and promise big change in the country. Biden's plan all along has been to attack Trump as just another Republican on the side of the rich and present an alternative in style by acting with dignity.

A Thought about Religion

Show me my way in life, and I will build you a shrine.

– Danny Thomas

Crop Domestication in the Amazon

As I have written here before, there is a raging debate about the ancient peoples of the Amazon, and thus about to what extent the great rain forest is "natural". One reason the debate continues is that Amazonia is a terrible place to do archaeology: there is little stone, so most tools were made of wood and bone, which don't survive in the intense heat and rot. There are few places where deep soils accumulate along rivers, so the remains of the whole past are mingled together in the shallow surface layer.

Nonetheless knowledge is slowly building up. Something of a consensus has emerged among archaeologists that farming in the region began by 2000 BC, and that dense populations developed in some parts of the region, surviving until the arrival of Europeans and their diseases. Seeking to learn more about these people who left little behind but some earthworks and a lot of boring brown pottery, archaeologists are now looking to a new kind of evidence: the forests themselves. This is from a new paper by Charles Clement and a bunch of others: 

During the twentieth century, Amazonia was widely regarded as relatively pristine nature, little impacted by human history. This view remains popular despite mounting evidence of substantial human influence over millennial scales across the region. Here, we review the evidence of an anthropogenic Amazonia in response to claims of sparse populations across broad portions of the region. Amazonia was a major centre of crop domestication, with at least 83 native species containing populations domesticated to some degree. Plant domestication occurs in domesticated landscapes, including highly modified Amazonian dark earths (ADEs) associated with large settled populations and that may cover greater than 0.1% of the region. Populations and food production expanded rapidly within land management systems in the mid-Holocene, and complex societies expanded in resource-rich areas creating domesticated landscapes with profound impacts on local and regional ecology. ADE food production projections support estimates of at least eight million people in 1492. 

By this time, highly diverse regional systems had developed across Amazonia where subsistence resources were created with plant and landscape domestication, including earthworks. This review argues that the Amazonian anthrome was no less socioculturally diverse or populous than other tropical forested areas of the world prior to European conquest. 

The evidence is complex and all of this is controversial. One discovery is that while the oldest evidence for the domestication of many tropical plants comes from coastal Mexico (hot peppers, cacao) or coastal Peru (sweet potatoes), the wild ancestors of those plants live mainly in the Amazon. Thus, say the authors, it makes sense that they were domesticated in Amazonia. (Other scenarios are possible; our strawberries come from the New World but were first successfully domesticated in Europe, having been brought over as wild plants.) Also, many areas of the Amazon forest show signs of having been intensely managed in the past. Archaeologists learned about these practices by talking to Amazon natives who still do this. Areas that look to the untrained eye to be wild forests turn out to be semi-tamed by practices like selective burning, cutting down undesirable trees, encouraging useful plants, killing predators, and so on. These authors believe that vast stretches of the Amazon were manged in this way; for example, they think the Brazil nut tree was very rare before people came along, and its presence in what amount to groves across the region is due to human action. "Wild" stands of the acai palm (photo at top) are now considered a reliable sign of nearby prehistoric or early historic villages.

Language also provides another kind of evidence. We know that in East Asia and North and Central America the languages of early farming groups spread widely into other areas, and languages native to early farming areas area widely distributed across Amazonia.

Taking this biological and linguistic evidence together with the ever growing archaeological record makes me more convinced that there was a large human population in the Amazon, and thus that Amazonia is in no sense an untouched wilderness. In fact in may be time to retire that whole way of thinking about the natural world.

Macro Flowers

Macro Winners of the International Garden Photographer of the Year 2020, via My Modern Met. Above, “Common Blues on Apple Mint” by Tony North,  Derbyshire, England.

Bruno Mitelli, "Vortex Blossom," Brazil

Peter Pullan, "The Presence", Western Australia

Qasim Syed, "Silver-Studded Blues on Heather," London

Pandemics, Lockdowns, and Mental Health

According to several recent studies, the mental health of Americans is worse now than it has ever been. Here is the latest:

One in four young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 say they've considered suicide in the past month because of the pandemic, according to new CDC data that paints a bleak picture of the nation's mental health during the crisis.

The data also flags a surge of anxiety and substance abuse, with more than 40 percent of those surveyed saying they experienced a mental or behavioral health condition connected to the Covid-19 emergency. The CDC study analyzed 5,412 survey respondents between June 24 and 30.

Question: is this a good argument for re-opening schools and some businesses, or not?

Links 14 August 2020

Man of Sorrows by Tilman Riemenschneider

Remember Frank Gehry's very controversial design for the Eisenhower memorial in Washington? Well, it is finally finished, although much modified, and the Washington Post likes it.

Utterly weird video of giraffes fighting.

In the post-Soviet world, the fatter a nation's politicians, the worse the corruption.

Long Washington Post article on studies of why so many people seem to have partial immunity to the novel coronavirus, quite fascinating.

Inside the struggle to keep California's vanity plates clean and decent.

Peter Stearns ponders shame as an emotion and means of social control.

Matt Yglesias on the immigrant background of Kamala Harris.

Ezra Klein explores what John Maynard Keynes would have recommended in our current economic situation.

There are only two products which it is economically profitable to recycle: cardboard and aluminum. Therefore, they are the only ones that get stolen, and they get stolen a lot. The BBC on cardboard theft rings in Spain. 

Katie Hill, who resigned from Congress after her affairs were revealed and nude pictures of her started circulating on the internet, is launching a comeback around a podcast to be called "Naked Politics with Kaite Hill." (NY Times)

Harris, Obama, and Race in America

Joe Biden is nothing if not predictable, and for VP on his ticket he picked the person I and many, many others predicted he would. My eldest son asked me how I "knew." Of course I did not know, and might have been wrong, but I thought that 1) Biden was not going to pick an interesting newcomer because his whole strategy is about playing it safe, and 2) he probably sees his main vulnerability vs. Trump on the issues of riots and defunding the police. As a former "tough" prosecutor, Harris is going to be hard to bait over being soft on crime or hating cops. And just by not being white she neutralizes a lot of potential criticism from the left.

Which gets me to one of the two things I want to bring up, the weird way race plays into American politics. We have two kinds of politics: left-right politics over economic issues, environmental issues, crime and so on; and race. We sometimes like to pretend that these are the same, that support for racial equality is just another part of an agenda for liberation and equality writ large, or contra-wise part of government overreach, social engineering, and a hatred of real excellence. And there are many people who fuse all of these positions. But in practice race politics and general left-right politics are not at all the same thing. You can see this most clearly in the career of Barack Obama, who was honestly a quite conservative person. He didn't advocate for gay marriage until the country was through "evolving," he kept trying to cut a budget deal with Republicans that would slash the deficit, etc. But because he was black and prone to rhetorical flights of fancy about "change," many people on the left and the right saw him a a far more radical figure than he was. On the left some people had the weird notion that he was a revolutionary and professed themselves bitterly disappointed in his presidency, whereas on the right many invested him with all their fears about race war, socialism, and the government taking everyone's guns – this last about a man who consistently got an F from the Brady Campaign for his indifference to gun issues. I agree with Andrew Sullivan that Obama was more like a moderate Republican than a left-wing radical, and I think the main failings of his presidency all have to do with his constant pursuit of a middle way. But getting most Americans to talk sensibly about his actual policies seems impossible.  

Kamala Harris strikes me as very much like Obama in this way. She is not at all radical, and is in fact too conservative for me on some of the issues I care about the most: environmental concerns, police violence, prosecutorial overreach, fondness for foreign wars. But she gets support from some radicals by virtue of being a woman of color who both lives and fights for racial and gender equality.

Another thing Harris shares with Obama is a complex racial background. Both are the children of immigrants, not the descendants of slaves. Both grew up mixed-race in places (Hawaii for Obama, Berkeley and Montreal for Harris) where the racial divide was not particularly important. Both of them could have proclaimed themselves "post racial" and set about making race as unimportant in their lives as possible. Instead they both made a conscious decision at a key moment in their lives to be Black. For Obama this was after law school when he moved to Chicago, became a community activist, and joined a black church, eventually entering politics. For Harris it came when she chose to attend Howard University in DC, pledge a black sorority, and then enter politics as a black candidate. These days when she is challenged for not really being black (which happens frequently) she points to her time at Howard as a key experience in her life.

Anyway I wonder what the prominence of Harris and Obama, two people who have in their lives slid in and out of African American culture, says about race in America. Is it just a matter of being black enough to get black support but not so black as to threaten white people? Was their experience influenced enough by race to make them into activists, but not enough to turn them against the dominant culture and the political process? Or is it something in their own psychology, some sort of insider-outsider dichotomy, that drives them to reach for the top? (Remember, readers, that I think all presidents are crazy, and that I consider wanting to be president to be a sort of mental illness.)

I also think the wave of non-European immigrants over the past 40 years has been hugely important in changing race relations in America. I think the entry of millions of people who are not white but also not enmeshed in the endless trench warfare between black and white America has shifted the dynamic and pointed the way to a much better future. It will be much easier to achieve racial equity in an America with four big racial groups, none dominant, than under the old demographic regime of 85% white - 15% black.

Los Confederados

In the Washington Post, Terrence McCoy calls our attention to the growing ferment over the commemoration of Brazil's Confederate past:

To Marina Lee Colbachini, it was a family tradition. Each spring, she would join the throngs who descended on a nondescript city in southern Brazil, don a 19th-century hoop skirt and square dance to country music.

The theme of the annual festival: the Confederate States of America.

It’s one of history’s lesser-known episodes. After the Civil War, thousands of defeated Southerners came to Brazil to self-exile in a country that still practiced slavery. For decades, their descendants have thrown a massive party that now attracts thousands of people to the twin cities of Americana and Santa Bárbara d’Oeste to celebrate all things Dixie. The Confederate flag? Everywhere. 

At least 8,000 former Confederate citizens, some say 20,000, emigrated to Brazil after 1865. They sought cheap land, distance from the hated Yankees, and above all to own slaves again and bring back the world they had just lost. The newspapers called it “Brazilian fever.” The exodus ceased in 1888, when Brazil abolished slavery.

Brazil has different racial traditions than the US, and of course Los Confederados were a lot less important in Brazil than they had been in the US. So the issue of their flag has been pretty much ignored. Until now:

Brazilians in recent weeks have demanded the removal of the notorious statue in São Paulo of a 17th-century settler who enslaved indigenous people. Protests for black equality have rumbled through several cities. And in Americana and Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, the cities founded by the Confederates, Brazilians who have never been to the United States are increasingly asking questions piercingly familiar to Americans: Where should the Confederacy be remembered — on a flagpole, or in a museum?

Interestingly one activist told McCoy that she began to think about the flag after the murders committed by Dylan Roof, which led to the flag being taken down in South Carolina. The argument over the flag is just getting under way, so there is no resolution, but I think it an increasingly globalized world it is not likely to remain flying on public property anywhere.

Sunflowers

I've been a bit disappointed in this summer's garden, partly because the deer have done a lot of nibbling and partly because I have a weak crop of zinnias, I think because of the weird spring weather. We've also had fewer butterflies than usual. That may be because they like zinnias but also possibly because of the cool, damp spring. But these sunflowers are putting on a show.

Liberals Fighting over the Police

 On the New York city council, demands from progressives to defund the police have run into opposition from black politicians worried about crime. NY Times:

With New York City on the cusp of cutting $1 billion from the Police Department, a city councilwoman, Vanessa L. Gibson, told her colleagues that enough was enough.

She acknowledged that some Council members, spurred by the movement to defund the police, were seeking to slash even more from the department’s budget. But she pointed out that her constituents did not agree.

They “want to see cops in the community,” Ms. Gibson said.

“They don’t want to see excessive force. They don’t want to see cops putting their knees in our necks,” she said. “But they want to be safe as they go to the store.”

Ms. Gibson is not a conservative politician speaking on behalf of an affluent district. She is a liberal Black Democrat who represents the West Bronx, and her stance reflects a growing ideological rift over policing in one of the country’s liberal bastions. . . .

Laurie Cumbo, a Black councilwoman from Brooklyn who is majority leader, compared calls to defund the police to “colonization” pushed by white progressives. Robert Cornegy Jr., a Black councilman also from Brooklyn, called the movement “political gentrification.”

It strikes me that this is the latest blow-up in a long battle between black leaders and white progressives, as we saw for example with the Sanders campaign. Black leaders routinely criticize white progressives for living in a fantasy land made possible by their privileged position: rich white people can afford to indulge in ideological flights of fancy, but black people and especially poor black people cannot.

I am not posting this just to roast progressives who annoy me; you can easily see how this streak of black conservatism could impede progressive change in a nation where the left needs 90% of the black vote to make any headway. I am just doing my usual thing and pointing out that the world is complex. This is the political reality, and this fight once again points out the political naivete of American progressives, who enjoy striking bold progressive poses much more than they enjoy building coalitions of voters.

And, yes, "defund the police" does annoy me, because it pretends that we have only one problem and solving that one will magically make the others (shootouts between drug gangs, rape) go away.

Lionel Messi and Joe Biden

Lionel Messi, to my mind the most extraordinary athlete of our time, was brilliant again against Napoli this week – if you're curious why people worship him, see the goal at 2:58 of this video. He is also Barcelona's team captain, a role he shunned for most of his career because he would rather play than talk. But reporters listening in the tunnel heard him say this to his teammates as they went in for halftime:

Tenemos dos goles de ventaja, no seamos pelotudos. Juguemos tranquilos.

Which might be translated,

We have a two goal lead, let's not be jackasses. Play calmly.

Which, it struck me, is exactly the motto of the Joe Biden campaign.

Bill Gates is Not Happy with America's Coronavirus Response

 From an interview at Wired:

WIRED: You have been warning us about a global pandemic for years. Now that it has happened just as you predicted, are you disappointed with the performance of the United States?

Bill Gates: Yeah. There’s three time periods, all of which have disappointments. There is 2015 until this particular pandemic hit. If we had built up the diagnostic, therapeutic, and vaccine platforms, and if we’d done the simulations to understand what the key steps were, we’d be dramatically better off. Then there’s the time period of the first few months of the pandemic, when the US actually made it harder for the commercial testing companies to get their tests approved, the CDC had this very low volume test that didn’t work at first, and they weren’t letting people test. The travel ban came too late, and it was too narrow to do anything. Then, after the first few months, eventually we figured out about masks, and that leadership is important. . . .

But things are getting better:

At this point, are you optimistic?

Yes. You have to admit there’s been trillions of dollars of economic damage done and a lot of debts, but the innovation pipeline on scaling up diagnostics, on new therapeutics, on vaccines is actually quite impressive. And that makes me feel like, for the rich world, we should largely be able to end this thing by the end of 2021, and for the world at large by the end of 2022. That is only because of the scale of the innovation that’s taking place. Now whenever we get this done, we will have lost many years in malaria and polio and HIV and the indebtedness of countries of all sizes and instability. It’ll take you years beyond that before you’d even get back to where you were at the start of 2020. It’s not World War I or World War II, but it is in that order of magnitude as a negative shock to the system.

Gates notes that hospitals have cut the death rate in half with existing drugs and better care, and

This disease, from both the animal data and the phase 1 data, seems to be very vaccine preventable

But Gates remains angry about certain bottlenecks:

But people aren’t getting their tests back quickly enough.

Well, that’s just stupidity. The majority of all US tests are completely garbage, wasted. If you don’t care how late the date is and you reimburse at the same level, of course they’re going to take every customer. Because they are making ridiculous money, and it’s mostly rich people that are getting access to that. You have to have the reimbursement system pay a little bit extra for 24 hours, pay the normal fee for 48 hours, and pay nothing [if it isn’t done by then]. And they will fix it overnight.

Why don’t we just do that?

Because the federal government sets that reimbursement system. When we tell them to change it they say, “As far as we can tell, we’re just doing a great job, it’s amazing!” Here we are, this is August. We are the only country in the world where we waste the most money on tests. Fix the reimbursement. Set up the CDC website. But I have been on that kick, and people are tired of listening to me.

Complications of Race in America

From a review of Life of a Klansman by Edward Ball, which focuses on his nineteenth-century ancestor Constant Lecorgne:

Near the end of his book, Ball makes a fascinating digression. It involves a prominent person of color who lived in New Orleans at the same time as Lecorgne. Louis Charles Roudanez was a medical doctor, trained in France and at Dartmouth, who published The New Orleans Tribune, a daily newspaper for the Black community. An homme de couleur libre, Roudanez married a free woman of color. While researching his own family, Ball decided to look for the descendants of the Roudanez family.

He finds one of the physician-publisher’s great-great-grandchildren, named Mark Roudané, living in a leafy subdivision of St. Paul, Minn. “He was raised white, and he appears white,” Ball writes of Roudané. “In middle age he learned that according to the one-drop rule of blackness, he was not white.” Roudané did not know the tale of his father’s ancestors, or even the Roudanez spelling of his family name, until he stumbled across some family documents when he was 55. As happened with Ball, the discovery of a bit of family history leads Roudané on a quest. “When my father died, in 2005, I was going through his papers and throwing stuff away, and I found an unmarked binder,” Roudané tells Ball. It contained papers showing how his father, who was designated as “colored” on his birth certificate, had forsaken his distinguished roots, changed the spelling of his name as a young man, gone to Tulane by passing as white and then moved to the Midwest. Despite this history, or perhaps because of it, he became a resentful white racist. “When it came to talking about Black people,” Mark Roudané told Ball, “all this venom would come out. I thought, ‘Why is my dad being ugly?’ I didn’t understand it.”

This reminds me of something I read recently, that after emancipation many American octaroons headed for the west coast, telling their black relations, "don't write us, we'll write you."

Links 7 August 2020

Coudersport, Pennsylvania, taken from a passing train by a friend

Long, sad, moving and fascinating article by Basharat Peer telling the story behind a photograph of a young man holding his friend's dying body by the side of a road in rural India. (NY Times)

A Polish mayor is offering locals a reward if they have a baby boy after it emerged that in the last nine years only girls have been born in their village.

Evidence for the medical benefits of orthodontic treatment is very slim.

People are complicated: Juan Carlos, former King of Spain, once saved Spanish democracy by standing up to a fascist coup, but is now under indictment for money laundering and other financial crimes and has fled the country. (NY Times)

Washington Post story on efforts to keep invasive insects called adelgids from wiping out hemlock trees in the eastern US.

Nigerian artist Patrick Onyekwere makes amazing hyper-realistic portraits using ballpoint pens.

The closing of a paper mill in Wisconsin represents both long-term trends and the immediate impact of the pandemic (Washington Post)

Pineapples as status symbols

Wall Street Journal: With No Federal Agents on Streets, Portland Protests Turn Largely Peaceful. (Gated, but important to note that not just liberal reporters saw this.)

Americans are terrible at estimating their risk of being crime victims

Ancient Mars may have been covered by ice sheets

Tokyo's "Throw-Away Temple," resting place of generations of prostitutes.

There are no grown-ups: yet another self-proclaimed victim of persecution turns out to have engineered the whole thing, but this time the perpetrator is a neurology professor and it unfolded on academic Twitter. (NY Times)

This NY Times piece about the street art adorning boarded-up storefronts in NYC is pretentious, but the images are fascinating.

Things One Didn't Know were Real

Three sailors stranded on a small island in Micronesia were rescued after a passing plane spotted the giant S O S they had scrawled in the sand.

Wojciech Rokosz

Polish muralist Wojciech Rokosz recently enlivened a 1960s housing estate in Krakow with these lovely murals of birds native to the region. When these apartments were built any murals would of course have been political, but Rokosz says he "wanted to go in a different direction." The murals were paid for by the homeowners themselves.

Deworming and Success

Edward Miguel on Twitter:

Starting in 1998, Michael Kremer and I evaluated a large-scale public health program that provided an additional 2-3 years of medical treatment for intestinal worm infections to tens of thousands of Kenyan primary school children. 

20 years later (!), our newest findings show that the same individuals (now adults) have higher household earnings, spend more on consumption goods, and are more likely to live in urban areas.

For <$0.50 per child per year, the observed gains imply that deworming medication has an enormous social rate of return. This research is a timely reminder that public investments in proven health solutions can have immense payoffs.

To the Unknown America

To Ed Simon, putting up statues of heroes is a fraught act, always political and therefore always against somebody or something, and likely to be unpopular at some time in the future. He thinks it might be better to borrow an idea from ancient Greek religion:

In Rome’s Palatine Museum, built atop the excavation site of Emperor Domitian’s palace and not far from imperial residences of Tiberius and Augustus, there is a curious bit of masonry that was rediscovered in 1820. This artifact is exhibited alongside terra cotta heads of Jupiter and marble sculptures of Apollo, all of the grand detritus of a lost civilization housed in a former monastery. At the corner of one of the museum’s galleries sits this short altar chiseled from granite that’s slightly worn from the elements and framed with a modest curled design where a statue might sit. No idol is framed by the base; no statue of strong Jupiter or beautiful Apollo sits atop the altar. It is rather simply dedicated to Agnostos Theo — the “Unknown God.” Where a deity would normally be present is rather a sacred and beautiful nothingness.

These altars were not uncommon in the ancient Mediterranean. The most famous reference to them is in a homily delivered by the Apostle Paul in the Book of Acts, in which he claims that an altar to the Unknown God on the Areopagus Hill in Athens was actually in honor of Christ (the Athenians, ripe for conversion, Paul thought, had yet to fully understand that). Arguments have been made that the altars honored the undepictable God of the Jews, or that they’re a bit of pragmatic hedge-betting for any deities who should be worshiped but that have escaped the attention of the otherwise pious. Regardless of the exact intent of their makers, the altars for the Unknown God present an arresting memorial — the blessing of a lacunae, the sacralization of an absence. . . .

Any statue — be it of Christopher Columbus or Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson or Frederick Douglass — makes a statement about who is worth preserving in bronze. To make a statue of a recognizable subject is to venture something about that subject, but an altar for nothing argues that its subject is so all-encompassing, so universal, so grand that it can’t be circumscribed in mere stone. Christian theologians speak of a methodology called “apophasis,” whereby the divine is discussed in terms of what can’t be known about it, where definition is always deferred and thought can’t be put into mere words. In some ways the altar to the Unknown God is a form of apophatic sculpture, whereby nonexistence is a heftier material than steel or bronze.

I’d also suggest that the apophatic is precisely the mode in which we should think of our national future, for if God is a lofty subject, then so are “freedom,” “democracy” and “America.” We are better served in memorializing the contradictory, conflicted and hypocritical history of this nation not in monumental equestrian statues punctuating traffic roundabouts but in a humbler idiom that paradoxically expresses an inherent greatness in all the more remarkable of a way.

I am attracted to this idea, and purely negative theology is the only kind I've ever been able to stand. But I notice that many other people find this coldly abstract and long for something more concrete and human. Simon cites the Vietnam War memorial in Washington as a good example of a more negative sort of monument, but so many people hated it that the government was eventually forced to add statues nearby to assuage the critics. After all, venerating heroes goes back to the earliest strata of human myth, and the habit is not likely to disappear because our generation finds it politically problematic.

I could, I think, get behind a plan to replace some Confederate or otherwise offensive memorials with something dedicated to "Those who struggled for freedom" or "Those who yearn to be free", provided the design was not overtly partisan, or just hideous. Right now unspecificity might be the only way to unite people around any image.

A Tool for Making Rope, 40,000 Years Old

This mammoth tusk with four drilled holes comes from the Hohle Fels Cave in Germany, and is about 40,000 years old. It is about 20 cm (8 inches) long. But what is it? 

Probably a tool for making rope. And that is very interesting because rope is one of the most useful of all human inventions. This is Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London, who recently identified other Paleolithic objects from Gough Cave in England as tools of the same type:

A lot of attention has been given to the importance of our abilities to make specialised stone tools and to use fire as being key elements of the prehistoric success of Homo sapiens. But in many ways, the ability to make string and rope out of animal tissue and plant fibres was every bit as revolutionary in its impact at the time. It opened up all sorts of new avenues for exploiting the natural world, from the weaving of baskets to the construction of bows and arrows.

Or attaching sails to boats or a thousand other things.

The Thief in the Night

BBC:

For weeks residents of Zehlendorf were baffled that a thief was stealing their flip flops and sports shoes from their gardens at night.

Finally a man spotted the culprit on a patch of wasteland, "in flagrante, carrying two blue flip flops in its mouth", the daily Tagesspiegel reports.

The fox had a hoard of over 100 shoes.

The Spokane Indians

Fascinating article by David Waldstein in the Times about one sports team that is not considering changing its name, baseball's Spokane Indians:

The minor league team in Washington State has been collaborating with the Spokane Tribe of Indians in what it hopes is a respectful manner of honoring the local Indigenous population.

Can that be done? Some say it is not possible, but the Spokane Indians may be as close to an understanding as any team has come.

“They came and listened to the elders, and that is what really developed the relationship over time,” said Carol Evans, the chairwoman of the Spokane Tribal Council, “and it has grown like a family partnership unit, where we have a lot of respect for one another.” . . .

The Cleveland Indians of Major League Baseball said they were having discussions about the “best path forward” regarding their name.

The Spokane Indians have had such talks, too, even volunteering to abandon the name 14 years ago but eventually deciding to keep it with the support of tribal leadership.

Among other things the players have the name Spokane written native style on their uniforms, and signs in their ballpark are bilingual. There are interpretive signs describing traditional Spokane culture, and the team is helping to rebuild the baseball field on the reservation.

It is, as far as I am concerned, a model of how such matters ought to be handled. Respectfully, face to face, with openness to change on both sides. So, of course,

But Suzan Shown Harjo, an advocate for Native American rights who has led the fight against Indigenous team names and mascots in sports for decades, said no matter the good intent, the name should still be changed.

“There is no such thing as respectable treatment of any mascot or team name that has a native theme in sports,” she said. “There is just no such thing, no matter how you package it.”

There are are always ideologues who insist that their abstractions matter more than actual relationships between people. That people of good heart have met face to face and agreed on these things matters nothing to them; they know heresy when they see it, and it must be stamped out.

I have lately read all sorts of statements to the effect that black and white Americans can never understand each other so long as racism endures; it is almost a commonplace in certain precincts. But in America 24% of black newlyweds are married to someone of a different race, and we have more than 600,000 black-white marriages. True, some of them don't understand each other, but then that is true of all married couples and especially all newlyweds. Others, I am quite certain, know each other inside and out, whatever anybody's ideology says.

The answers to our problems will not be found at the level of abstraction and ideology, but face to face; the abstract rule we need more of is Love thy Neighbor as Thyself.

Only love can save those who are infected with anger

From an interview with Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich:

Life itself gives birth to all my themes. At first, as you know, it turned into several books. A history of that period of time, the Red time, when the idea mattered most of all. Everyone was infected with the idea, to a greater or lesser extent. Or, at least, they were curbed by it. But everyone depended on it and many believed sincerely in it. In the end, many lost faith. But the idea remained, like an unyielding inner core, a reinforcing steel bar. During this lifetime, the time when the idea ruled, various things happened. I selected the most overpowering, most dramatic events, ones that could shed a light on what kind of people we were. What we had been through. How we had been deceived by that utopian vision. And how, at first, we hadn’t understood but eventually began to understand. How we wouldn’t have been able to endure living in any other way than we did. It wouldn’t have worked for us. 

As I moved on, from one book to the next, something struck me. People talk about the war or about Chernobyl. But only rarely do people talk about happiness. A feeling grew on me that people didn’t talk about the things that really matter in human lives. And I’d look back over my own life. My childhood, for instance. My parents never spoke about happiness. About how you ought to be happy and grow up. How beautiful life is, how joyful it is when love comes to you. How you will have children but not only that, you will also find love. And that it is something so enigmatic, so interesting. But … all the talks we had were about death and the mother country. Talks about what is important about being human simply never happened. Later in life, it was just more of the same. Of course, people did fall in love and led their lives. But there never seemed to be … a philosophy of life. It was up to the individual to try every day to push ahead, and reach for the meaning of it all. This was neither seen as a philosophy for individuals nor for communities. Always, there was something that mattered more. That towered above human beings. A striving of some kind, a sacrifice of some kind. Which you must be prepared for, always. And when I had come to the end of that series of books – when utopia had been defeated, when we were all caught up in the rubble it left behind – I began to think that I wanted to write an account of who we are, in ourselves, but from a different point of view.

I wondered: what would be the core of a narrative like that? If, earlier on, the core had been Afghanistan or the war or Chernobyl – where would you find it now? I thought that it would probably be found among the things we never used to think about. Never, that is, until now, when private life has finally been resurrected. When, finally, money has taken on meaning, significance. Before, everyone was just as broke as everyone else. Money hadn’t meant anything in particular. Now, though, people had started to travel, to see the world. For them, a lot of questions had surfaced, they had found desires. If they wanted to, they could dive into a kind of vast ocean that was completely unknown to them. That’s to say, into private life. It offered another form of human meaningfulness than to go off and die somewhere. As it turned out, literature – Russian literature – was unable to help them because it has always been preoccupied with quite different things. With loftier and high-order ideas, that is. It always contains something ready to squash human life. Whatever higher order idea it is. And then I thought, of course, love is the most important, essential aspect of us; it, and the time when we are about to slip away. When we prepare ourselves for disappearing from this world. . . .

On one hand: this is my way ahead, a stage in my travels. The journey is part of to my present intentions. On the other hand: ahead, there is an opportunity to speak about what is valuable in life – personally, I feel that all other words are drained of meaning. Should I once more travel to find the war, and then write about the war? And once more speak out about how senselessly people kill each other and what an insane occupation it is to murder another human being? That ideas should be killed, not people. That everyone should sit down at a table and talk together …? None of all that works any more. It is banal. I check the internet and read every day: ‘Today, thirty militiamen in the Russia-supporting militia have been killed and twenty soldiers in the Ukrainian army. And five civilians.’ That’s how the day begins. I don’t think it would help if I kept speaking about this. Because I believe that … love is what people miss most of all. Perhaps THIS is the language I would like to start speaking. Besides, nowadays, the situation is that society is hugely fragmented and people have become infected with anger. So, there is a lot of hatred around. I don’t think it is possible to conquer it with ordinary words, with ordinary arguments.

The writer Oksana Zabuzhko1 recently published a book based on all the writings that were posted on the internet during the Maidan [Ukrainain revolution]. I wrote in the book that all the dreadful things quoted in it – that people died and were ill-treated – can be turned either into hatred or into love. I wished they were used for love. Only love can save those who are infected with anger.

I have never read anything with which I agree more. Life is not about things that loom above us, that are always threatening to squash us, the ideas that demand we sacrifice ourselves for their sake. It is about us, and those we know and love, and what we make together. 

Today's Place to Daydream about: Fiordland National Park, New Zealand

At the southern end of New Zealand's South Island is a spectacular landscape of mountains, lakes, and fjords, which they insist on spelling "fiord."

At the heart of it is Milford Sound, which Rudyard Kipling called the Eighth Wonder of the World.

 

The area became a National Park in 1904, partly because the 4-day Milford Track from Lake Anu to Milford Sound had become popular, designated by various newspapers the World's Greatest Walk. The way everything about the history of Zealand is now described goes like this: 

Quintin McKinnon and Donald Sutherland opened up the Milford Track in 1889 and began guiding tourists through the now world-famous route. (The Maori had long known of this route.)

Inland around the lakes are vast areas of lush rain forest. Full of ferns, which are something of a national symbol to New Zealanders; when they recently had a contest to design a new flag half the finalists had ferns on then.

Many visitors explore the fjords by cruise boat or kayak.

Reading over the "personal experiences" posted to TripAdvisor one frequently sees two kinds of comments: "best day of hiking in my whole life," and "nonstop rain." Experienced hikers of the longer treks say that if you didn't get rained on you didn't have the full experience.

Waterfalls abound, including Sutherland Falls, one of the world's tallest.

Wildlife includes kiwis, kackapos, and takahe (above). The fjords are full of seals, orcas, and dolphins.

What an amazingly beautiful place.

Body Snatching

There was a lot of noise this week about the police in New York "kidnapping" people off the streets and stuffing them into unmarked vans. I decided I ought to look into this. 

What I learned is that the police were arresting people for whom there were outstanding warrants. Each police precinct in New York has a special squad of plainclothes detectives who do this; the point of not wearing uniforms or driving police cruisers is so they can get closer to their targets before they are recognized. (Although you have to wonder about the savvy of criminals who can't spot a vanful of plainclothes cops coming a mile away.)

So that's at least defensible. But who, exactly, have they been arresting out of peaceful protests? People who have pissed them off:

The men in the van, it turns out, were plainclothes officers from the New York Police Department’s Warrant Squad, and they were detaining a young woman who was later identified as Nikki Stone, an 18-year-old homeless trans girl. An NYPD spokesperson, Sergeant Jessica McRorie, told Vox, “The NYPD had probable cause to arrest her for five previous crimes,” which included allegations of vandalizing police cameras with stickers and paint around City Hall Park in Manhattan.

I mean, I have no problem with the police arresting criminals. But these Warrant Squads were set up to arrest the most violent and dangerous crooks, and these days they spend their time hunting down people who put stickers on police cameras.

When there are what, fifty unsolved murders in New York already this year? No wonder crime has gone up.

Not only that, but their spokesman insisted to reporters that the officers were pelted with rocks and bottles while they made this arrest, when there were like twenty people filming the whole thing, including the complete absence of flying rocks and bottles.

Every time I want to defend the police as people trying to do a hard job they pull another stupid stunt like this.

Links July 31 2020

Little dragons in a Book of Hours from Flanders, c. 1350-1390

Since I have been linking regularly to articles on liberal cancel culture, it's only fair that I link to Max Boot's essay on conservative cancel culture, which might be summarized as "love Trump or get lost." Indeed many conservatives, perhaps most outrageously Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, have been driven out of government or journalism for daring to criticize Trump.

The iPhone Photography Awards

The Netflix show "Indian Matchmaking" is a huge hit with people of Indian origin around the world, but it has also raised a storm of protest. Because, so far as I can tell, it depicts the arrangement of marriages as it is actually done and does not criticize the more problematic aspects of the process. 

According to the Times, New York's tailors are now spending all their time letting out the clothes of people who gained weight during the lockdown. I think I gained 5 pounds during the first two months so I've had to put myself on a rigorous diet to keep this from spiraling out of control. 

Borowitz Report: Fauci Urges Trump to Remain on Golf Course Until Pandemic Is Over.

NY Times story on the head trauma caused by bobsledding and skeleton, which may be causing a rash of suicides. Yet more evidence that while exercise is good for you, pursuing almost any sport at a very high level is usually not.

Reason wonders why the new US Space Force has horses.

In Japan, building a dam with robots

Hand-cranked miniature moving figures by Federico Tobon, quite charming.

Something different to collect: vintage gas station signs.

The disappearing vegetables of South India: reviewing a cookbook from 1951, a local chef finds 20 different varieties no longer available. He blames the Green Revolution and monoculture.

Could you outrun a Tyrannosaurus Rex?

More trials using Anglo-Saxon remedies to treat antibiotic-resistant infections.

Microsoft's plan to not only reduce its current carbon emissions to zero, by the most comprehensive measure, but to offset all the carbon emissions it has ever been responsible for.

The origin of the large Sarsen Stones that make up most of Stonehenge has been narrowed down to an area called the West Woods about 10 miles (15 km) from the site. This precision is possible because scientists got hold of a core drilled out of one of the stones in the 1950s and therefore not weathered; weathering changes the chemical composition of rocks too much to make exact sourcing possible using a chip from the outside of a stone.

In the US, Women have been Voting for 100 Years

Interesting essay by Gail Collins in the Times pondering what has been changed by women voting:

What better way to celebrate the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage than by discussing the way it turned out to be a big flop?

The great champions of the 19th Amendment thought that when America’s women got the right to vote, they’d immediately start to change the nation. Promote women’s issues, like better health care and education. Refocus politics from special interests to the general good.

Then in 1920, for the first time, they went to polls across the nation with their husbands, brothers, fathers and sons and elected — President Warren Harding.

As Collins notes, the first national issue on which voting women really formed a potent political bloc was prohibition, much more popular with women than men.

A "gender gap" did not really appear in national elections until 1980, when women barely supported Reagan but men preferred him 60% to 36%. Since then the gender gap in presidential elections has regularly been around 10%, for example 10% in 2000 and 11% in 2016. (It was smaller in 2004, when foreign war and fear of terrorism generated a "safety first" vote for Bush.)

But most women still sit comfortably within the political mainstream. The notion, once common, that bringing women into any world (politics, medicine, science) would have a transformative effect by itself has turned out to be completely wrong. In medicine it turns out that the setup of the whole medical system so strongly controls what doctors actually do that differences between men and women are minimal, and hopes that female doctors would be better listeners or more caring have not been realized. In politics it has turned out just as one would expect from observing women and men in any other context: we are different, but not so very much different.

Saving Louisiana, or Destroying It?

Long article by Nathaniel Rich in the Times about the $50 billion effort to keep southern Louisiana from washing away. Rich writes a fair amount about climate change but that really isn't the issue; the issue is that since we confined the Mississippi within levees all the way down it no longer dumps silt into the marshes with every flood, which is how the marshes came to be in the first place. Without fresh silt, they are disappearing at a stupendous rate.

With an infusion of $4 billion from the BP oil spill settlement, the first stages of the rescue plan are under way. Rich considers the program from two points of view: the high level question of whether Louisiana will survive, and the low-level point of view of a fishing captain named Kindra Arnesen he met at a public meeting:

“We have to be present, or they can say there’s ‘no opposition,’” Arnesen said. “I see this as doomsday. This will end us.”

This was the centerpiece of the master plan: the construction of new, man-made diversions in Plaquemines Parish [south of New Orleans]. The state would cut open the federal levee, creating powerful new distributaries of the Mississippi River that will flush sediment into the marsh, building land. These engineered floods would simulate the geological process that created the Mississippi Delta in the first place. The initial two incisions are to be made in the levees about 25 and 35 river miles south of New Orleans. Construction on the mid-Barataria Diversion on the west bank, could begin as soon as the end of 2022, followed by the mid-Breton Diversion on the east bank. Once running at full capacity, the diversions would themselves rank among the nation’s largest rivers. Both will flow at more than two times the volume of the Hudson River. Over the course of years and decades, it is hoped, the gargantuan volume of sediment borne by the diversions will patch the holes in the marsh’s moth-eaten fabric. Lost species will return and biological diversity will increase. The local fisheries might ultimately become even more productive.

In the short term, however, the diversions will transform the delicate estuarine ecosystems. They would likely massacre giant populations of oysters, brown shrimp, blue crab and dozens of species of fish. Areas of brackish water will turn fresh, and saltwater vegetation will die. Plaquemines Parish has the largest commercial fishing fleet in the continental United States. Arnesen worried that the diversions would destroy it.

And she is right to worry. But what is the alternative? Do nothing and Plaquemines Parish will cease to exist in 50 years. This can't be done on a small scale; immense amounts of water and silt have to be rerouted, or nothing will be gained.

Rich gives us another lesson in how quickly circumstances can come to seem normal, and for people to begin depending on them. Arnesen grew up harvesting oysters in salt marshes, and everyone in Plaquemines Parish thinks of this as the old way, now threatened by the diversions. But until the levees went up in the 1950s, those marshes were drowned in silt every year or two, so oysters must have been few and far between. Rich quotes one local as saying that his neighborhood "never" had high water during hurricanes until after the post-Katrina floodwalls went up around New Orleans, but that is absurd; again, the whole parish is built of silt deposited by the river in its floods. Nobody seems to even remember life before the levees.

And this is just stage one, politically the easiest lift; future plans for the area west of New Orleans call for drowning entire towns. 

Personally I do not think we know how these ecosystems will change after the diversions, so it will be years before we know how fishermen will have to adapt. I hope we are generous in helping them do so. But I don't see that we can afford to put off the whole effort because of what the impact on a few thousand people might be. Arnesen sees it differently:

“I don’t just do this because it’s my living,” Arnesen said as she left the meeting, trailing an entourage of well-wishers. “They’ve made our community feel like we’re the trade-off and we don’t matter. It’s easy for the state to say they’re going to come up with an adaptation plan. But what’s the point of an adaptation plan if the end goal isn’t the survival of the people you’re trying to save?”

It's a hard question, but holding to the status quo is simply impossible; Louisiana is losing an acre of land an hour and has lost 2,000 square miles since 1930. Like several US states, Louisiana's signs for state roads feature the state's outline, and one group of activists has been driving the point home by repainting the signs to show how the state will look in 2050 if nothing is done.

If the land disappears, they people will have to move on anyway, so we might as well save the land even if the people's livelihoods are ruined in the process.

Building a New City for Hong Kong Refugees

Tyler Cowen posted something on his blog about investors from Hong Kong seeking to build a "charter city" in Ireland and got this response from Mark Lutter:

Thanks for sharing the article about the Victoria Harbor Group. We, me being Chief Strategy Officer, are in discussions with Ireland. However, it is important to note that the information mentioned is dated. As any early stage company, our ideas have rapidly evolved. While the term we are using is ‘International Charter City’, we are not pursuing full scale autonomy. Our priority is to acquire land and build political support in the host country to build a city for the Hong Kong people with the target population being 50% HKers and 50% citizens of the host country.

Our key assumptions are as follows

1. The next 10-15 years will see 1m to 2m Hong Kongers migrate, the first mass migration of high skilled labor in the last 40 or so years.

2. There is value from coordinating this migration, keeping network effects, ensuring housing supply, etc

3. We see this as an opportunity to build the city of the future, cutting edge urban design, welcoming of new technology, self-driving cars, drone delivery, etc.

4. We are in discussions with several countries, not just Ireland, which we will make public when possible. We prefer English speaking countries with common law traditions, but are open to considering others.

5. Our goal is to acquire 50,000+ acres within 2 hours of an airport to build a new city for several hundred thousand residents. Obviously this depends on the political support in the host country. Smaller countries like Ireland would have smaller developments.

6. Political support from the host country is crucial. We are not asking for independence or autonomy. Of course, we wouldn’t say no to tax and regulatory relief, but that is less important than land availability and domestic buy in.

7. The city will fit in the national plans of the host country. The Hong Kongers excel in finance and manufacturing, as well as education and healthcare. While little manufacturing is done in Hong Kong, Hong Kongers own many factories in the Guangdong province. Any country looking to revive their manufacturing base could do so by attracting a bunch of talented HKers. Additionally, a good location could become a top 10 global financial center in 10 years by attracting HK financial talent.

8. We believe this is a great opportunity for any country which wants to attract a talented, hardworking, entrepreneurial population.

9. I have seen a lot of charter city projects and this is the first one I wanted to become part of the leadership team of.

There's a fascinating possibility, but count me as skeptical that this will really come off.

It did set me wondering what countries might be interested in this project. I  have rejected most of the places that came to mind because they already have racial tensions between Chinese and others: the Phillippines, Malaya, Australia, South Africa. New Zealanders are too eco-conscious to want a million more people of any sort. I have a hard time seeing the Irish accepting this; they like being Irish and are comfortable enough not being rich to be hard to bribe.

Canada? The Canadian west coast already has a big Chinese population and it seems like a natural destination. People have already suggested this in the comments to Cowen's post, so the idea has occurred to others. It seems to me British Columbia could have this if they wanted it.

Jamaica? They could use the money, and they are not much concerned about race. But I guess that would mean clearing the locals off 50,000 acres, since the island is already densely populated.

What about some parts of the US? All those business boosters in Texas might like the idea, and the race problem they worry about is Mexicans. An old rust belt state, like Michigan? One of my favorite offbeat ideas has always been to let a few hundred thousand extra refugees into the country on the condition that they settle in Detroit. I can't see California finding the room, since they have trouble finding the room for new apartment buildings. On the other hand a new thriving city in the Central Valley might take some of the pressure off the Bay Area, and people from Hong Kong are already used to conserving water.

Anyway for anyone interested in geography and city building it's a fabulous thing to daydream about.

Mars Jars and Nazi Science

Fascinating article by Sarah Scoles in the Times about the secret history of 'Mars Jars.' These are small terrariums set up to mimic conditions on Mars, which are used to see whether Earth life could survive there. They were popularized by Carl Sagan and many people assumed that he invented them.

Not so! A bit of sleuthing by a young post-doc named Jordan Bimm turned up old films from the 1950s depicting what were called even then 'Mars Jars.' Their inventor, it turns out, was a government scientist named Dr. Hubertus Strughold. Strughold worked for the US Air Force on issues related to biology and high altitude or space conditions, and he his work on Mars was sort of a side line. But he eventually did enough to publish the first scientific paper using the word 'astrobiology' and also organize the world's first astrobiology conference.

Besides having the perfect name for an evil mad scientist, Dr. Strughold turns out to have been an actual Nazi. He started his experiments on high altitudes physiology while working for the Luftwaffe. At the end of the war he was swept up by the US Army as part of Operation Paperclip and brought to America along with Werner von Braun and about 1600 other scientists and engineers.

What, exactly, did Strughold do?

Dr. Bimm studies the Cold Warriors who researched survival in the harsh environment of space. It’s what led him to the Mars Jars: He was diving into Dr. Strughold’s work on astronaut physiology and aviation medicine in the U.S. — work he had started in Nazi Germany for the Luftwaffe, and which was tangled up in inhumane experiments.

Dr. Strughold didn’t do these experiments himself, and he wasn’t a member of the Nazi party. But on his watch, researchers locked prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp in low-pressure chambers, to show what might happen to fliers at high altitude, and dressed them in fighter-pilot uniforms only to submerge them in freezing water.

“You don’t get to hold that job for 10 years unless you are 100 percent in lock step with the leadership,” Dr. Bimm said.

So Strughold was part of an organization that did awful experiments on concentration camp inmates, but there is no evidence that he participated in them. He did not join the Nazi Party but as Bimm says he would not have lasted in that job if he had not been considered politically reliable.

Scoles tosses around vague talk about "reassessing" the use of Strughold's research, but I find it hard to get upset about this. The Space Medicine Institute used to give out a Strughold Award, and when Strughold's Nazi past first came to light in 2013 they retired the award. Perfectly appropriate. But so far as I can see from this evidence Strughold was not Mengele, and whatever he did in Germany he developed Mars Jars in the US, torturing nobody but lichens and bacteria. I see no reason to stop messing with Mars Jars just because of their inventor's past.

Incidentally what these experiments show is that most of the time, earth life dies in Martian conditions, but sometimes lichens endure, and sometimes bacteria mutate and adapt.