Riches

Life in the Shark Lane on Tumblr:

My ancestors, watching me dump an entire stick of cinnamon, two cloves, an allspice berry, and a generous grating of nutmeg into my tea, sweetened with white sugar and loaded with cream, while I sit in my clean warm house surrounded by books, 25+ outfits for different occasions, and 6 pairs of shoes, in a building heated so well I have the windows open in mid-autumn: 

Our daughter prospers. We are proud of her. She has never labored in a field but knows riches we could not have imagined. 

Don Juan(s)

When you refer to someone as a Don Juan, you are entering a contested minefield of allusions. Which Don Juan was the famous seducer of women? 

There is, first of all, a famous historical character known as Don Juan of Austria. I love  this portrait, done by Alonso Sánchez Coello in 1559-1560. Don Juan was born in 1547, so he would have been about 12. 

Don Juan was the illegitimate son of Emperor Charles V and an Austrian barmaid/singer named Barbara Blomberg. The child was called Jeromin. The emperor took an interest in his son from afar and arranged for him to be brought to Spain and raised in a noble household. He even met the child a couple of times. 

In his will of 1558 the emperor recognized Jeromin as his son, but the old man died before he could convey his recognition. It was left to Charles' son Philip II of Spain to tell Jeromin that they were half brothers. So far as we can tell, the secret of his father's true identity had been concealed from the boy until then. Jeromin, now His Excellency Don Juan of Austria, was provided with a noble income and set up in a palace near the king's. He also attended university for a while. His father intended for Don Juan to enter the church but the son was far more interested in war.

(Imagine being 11 and learning that your father was the emperor. This story really makes me wish that there were nosy talk-show hosts in the 16th century to whom celebrities could have emoted about their feelings.)

In 1565 the on-again, off-again naval war with the Ottoman Turks heated up when the Turks attacked Malta. Don Juan asked for royal permission to join the Spanish fleet, was denied, tried to sneak off and join anyway but was too late. It took him until 1568 to get into a warship, fighting against Barbary corsairs. He then commanded troops on land, helping to put down a revolt among the Moors of Granada in a brutally effective fashion.

Don Juan's great meeting with history came in 1571, when he commanded the Spanish fleet at the naval battle of Lepanto, which often shows up in lists of history's most important battles.

Don Juan died in 1578, at the age of 31. But was he a famous seducer? He was certainly handsome and dashing, something often commented on by contemporaries:

a person of a most beautiful presence and of wonderful grace; with but little beard and large mustachios. His complexion is fair, and he weareth his hair long and turned back over his shoulders, the which is a great ornament unto him. He dresses sumptuously, and with such care and neatness, that it is as sight to see. Moreover, he is active and well-made, and succeedeth beyond measure in all manly exercises. No one rode, no one wielded the sword better than the young hero, who, moreover, had all the popular qualities fitted to ingratiate him with women and soldiers---he was gracious, affable, and open-handed. . . 

Another wrote:

He is agile, incomparable in riding, jousting and tourneys. . . He is learned, judicious, eloquent, gifted . . . splendid.

Most of the historical sites I have checked are completely unhelpful on the subject of Don Juan's lovers. However, several repeat the story that when Philip ordered him to the Netherlands to fight the rebels there, he is supposed to have refused unless he were allowed to invade Britain, rescue Mary Queen of Scots and wed her. Ah, chivalry.

Wikipedia does provide a list of four "woman who are confirmed to have had a relationship with John of Austria" and says he had children with three of them. A site called The Secret Lives of Royals does better, coming up with six, all with citations to various books. However, the matter seems to be very murky, since half of the citations say things like "the name of only one of his lovers is known." For such a famous and well-documented person this seems to have been hard to work out. An English biography of 1883 says,

Of the lady or ladies who enjoyed his affections and influenced his movements little is known. His amours were conducted with discretion and decorum, and do not appear to have provoked the jealousy or the enmity of fathers and husbands amongst the Neapolitan nobility, although one of the reasons assigned for the coolness between him and the Viceroy Granvelle was that the Cardinal was envious of the successes of the young soldier 'the fields of Venus and Mars.'

But now we come to the real question: was Don Juan of history the Don Juan who gave his name to seduction? If you look up the origin of Don Juan as a great lover, you are directed, not to Don Juan of Austria, but to a "Spanish legend" concerning a certain Don Juan of Seville. Although set in the 14th century, this "legend" was never written down until 1630, when it appeared in a play by Tirso de Molina. This version indeed supplies the plot used by Mozart and many others, which can be summarized like this:

Don Juan is a member of a distinguished family of Seville, who seduces the daughter of a noble, and when confronted by her father stabs him to death in a duel; he afterwards prepares a feast and invites the stone statue of his victim to partake of it; the stone statue turns up at the least, compels Don Juan to follow him, and delivers him over to the abyss of hell, the depths of which he had qualified himself for by his utter and absolute depravity.

I think is it far too simple to ascribe the currency of Don Juan the seducer in English, Spanish, and Italian (at least) to this story and Mozart's opera. I mean, there must have been lots of Don Juans, since Juan is such a common Spanish name, but in 1630 by far the most famous would have been Don Juan of Austria, hero of Lepanto, famously dashing and said to have been a great lover. Are we to think that nobody made the connection? Lord Byron certainly did, since his Don Juan of 1819-1824 merges the two figures together. The two people I have recently asked (neither one an opera lover) both said that of course Don Juan the seducer and Don Juan the hero of Lepanto were the same person. Plus, Mozart's Don Giovanni is just a straight out rapist and murderer, not at all how I imagine a Don Juan. 

So I think that the notion of a Don Juan owes something to both stories, but that without the fame of Don Juan of Austria it would not be nearly as common.

David Shor on Electoral Coalitions in America

From an interview with David Shor, a Democratic polling and data expert:

We have an election system that makes it basically impossible for Democrats’ current coalition to ever wield legislative power. We are legitimately in a position from here on out where we would need to get 54 percent of the popular vote — which we did not even accomplish this time — for multiple cycles in a row, for us to be in a position to really pass laws.

On that split between voters who went to college and didn’t: Are we at a high-water mark for the “diploma divide”? And will college suburbanites stay with Democrats, or do you expect them to go back to the GOP after Trump?

There’s a pretty consistent trend: In almost every country in the Western world, the gap between college-educated voters and non-college-educated voters has been steadily increasing for basically the last 60-70 years. There are very strong social currents pushing this change — that as the college-educated share of the population increases, this should naturally incentivize politicians to create cleavages by education.

Politics is fundamentally about splitting the country in half. And if college-educated white people are 4 percent of the electorate, like they were in the immediate post-World War II era, you can’t do that. But if they are 38 or 40 percent, suddenly you can. So, it’s unsurprising that as the education share has gone up, we’ve seen this happen.

If you think mechanically about the reinforcing currents that caused this, as college-educated white people enter the Democratic Party and become an increasingly large share of the Democratic Party while the reverse happens to Republicans, that naturally is going to influence who wins party primaries and what kind of people win internal party fights. In practice — given the fact that college-educated whites donate at disproportionate rates and volunteer at disproportionate rates — I think it’s going to be very hard for Democrats to resist the pull of catering to their preferences, which is naturally going to lead to losing votes among people who aren’t them: not just non-college educated whites, but, as we as we saw this cycle, also non-white voters. . . .

There is a broader trend, though, that as college-educated white people become a larger share of the Democratic coalition and a larger share of the Democratic voice, they do pull the party on cultural issues. Non-college educated white people have more culturally in common with working-class Black and working-class Hispanic voters. So, it should be unsurprising that as the cultural power of college-educated white people increases in the Democratic Party, non-white voters will move against us. . . .

The joke is that the GOP is really assembling the multiracial working-class coalition that the left has always dreamed of. But I think it’s worth remembering that both Black and Hispanic voters are still an overwhelmingly Democratic group, though Hispanic voters by a lot less than they were four or eight years ago. 

Links 13 November 2020

A Thangka Record of the Miracles at Gendüngang Monastery, 1200s

More evidence that increasing ethnic diversity leads to more individualism and less community feeling.

Archaeologists may have found the tiltyard where Henry VIII fell off his horse during a joust, a very serious accident which may have changed his personality and led to all sorts of bad things. On the other hand, maybe he was always a monstrosity and just stopped covering it up with smiles.

In the Jim Crow era, "We find that lynchings decrease with greater Black firearms access."

Centrist Democratic Congressmen lash out at progressives, saying their radical positions cost the Democrats the Senate and many seats in the House (Washington Post)

To celebrate Guy Fawkes' Day, the UK National Archives is displaying the invisible ink letters, written with orange juice, which the plotters sent to each other, the seizure of which exposed the plot.

I have a Concave Disposition.

Alex Tabarrok on how economic setbacks (losing a job or graduating in a recession) impact our psyches and lives.

The key role of drones in the recent fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh (Washington Post)

Kevin Drum reports that compared to the citizens of other democracies, Americans score high on hating the other political party but very low on liking their own.

The mayor of Amacuzac, Mexico, has been jailed for corrupt dealings with drug cartels, but he won reelection from his jail cell. (Washington Post)

Long NY Times article on the work of Joseph Tainter and other scholars interested in the collapse of civilizations; turns out many of them worry that they are living through such a collapse themselves.

Excavations at the tiny Greek islet of Vyrokastraki have revealed a small city occupied from Archaic to Byzantine times, including an inscription about a famous Hellenistic pirate.

In China online retailers celebrate 11/11 as "Singles Day," a sort of anti-Valentine's Day devoted to those who live alone, and indeed the day typically sets sales records.

Turkmenistan's dictator has erected a 19-foot-tall, gilded statue of his favorite dog breed. (Washington Post)

Bold, risky, path-breaking claims in science: asked why Neolithic Indonesians removed the long bones from some buries, an archaeologists said, "We don't know why long bone removal was practiced, but it's likely some aspect of the belief system of the people who lived at this time."

Duy Huynh

Vietnamese-American artist based in North Carolina. He says,

My characters often float (literally) somewhere between science and spirituality, memory and mythology, structure and spontaneity, ephemeral and eternal, humorous and profound, connectivity and non-attachment. The intent isn’t necessarily to provide enlightenment but to celebrate the quest itself. 

More at his web site.

What Might Be Happening in Washington

Imagine former Republican office holders in job interviews saying, "It's true I worked for Trump, but on the other hand he fired me."

Kazuo Ishiguro, "The Buried Giant"

The most remarkable thing about Kazuo Ishiguro's writing is that each of his books is completely different from the others. His most famous book, Remains of the Day, was made into a movie that many of you may have seen, with Anthony Hopkins as a rigidly honorable English butler living through the decline of the world that needed butlers. My favorite is Never Let Me Go, a near-future science fiction tale that I won't describe because I don't know how not to give away the very powerful conclusion that slowly grows on the reader and that still lingers darkly in my mind.

The Buried Giant, by contrast, is not a particularly good book. It has a fascinating premise, but one that could have been dealt with very easily in a 20-page short story. It is padded out into a short novel by page after page of formalized, pseudo-medieval conversion among people who mostly don't have a lot to say. I am now going to ruin the book for you, since I found the premise intriguing but the book around it tedious. 

The Buried Giant (2015) is set in Britain a generation after the death of King Arthur. In this world Britons and Saxons live side by side at peace, and the only fighting is against ogres and dragons. But nobody can remember anything. The two main characters are an elderly couple who decide to visit the son they can barely remember, before they forget him entirely; but really they are not sure how well they remember their son, or even if they ever had a son, since they can hardly remember last week. Along their journey they meet three children surviving on their own after their parents wandered off and forgot about them.

We discover that the forgetting, which they call the mist, is caused by the breath of a dragon named Querig. Various people want to kill this dragon and thereby clear their minds, but somehow this has not happened. Our main characters wonder if restoring their memories would really be a good thing; they have a great relationship now, but what if their returned memories included horrible fights, infidelities, or other wrongs they did each other? They decide that it does not matter, that whatever they remember will be fine, since they know they ended up  in a great place. But the reader is not so sure.

We learn, eventually, that Querig's breath causes forgetting because of a great spell that Merlin cast for Arthur, so that Britons and Saxons would forget the wrongs they have done to each other and live at peace. Since nobody remembers the relatives slain by their enemies, they have no reason to fight. And it has worked, maintaining the peace for a generation. Before he passed away Arthur charged his knights to defend the dragon with their lives, so that the peace could be maintained.

When the dragon is slain, we glimpse the future that we know of in history, a wave of Saxons marching across the island, conquering and killing, centuries of slaughter.

I find this fascinating. I suppose the obvious parallel would be Israelis and Palestinians, caught up to the death in memories of past wrongs.

Or seen in another way it is about the self, identity, and memory; who we are is what we remember. So the memories of loss that drive conflict are fundamental to our identities; without memory we can only drift, forgetting our own children. With it, we are forced to constantly confront the horrors of the past.

Christianizing the Savages

Unfortunately, the practices of European settlers are too often so diametrically opposed to the precepts of Christianity, and so deficient in humanity, justice, and charity, that the poor savage must be sorely puzzled to understand why this new faith, which is to do him so much good, should have had so little effect on his teacher’s own countrymen. The white men in our Colonies are too frequently the true savages, and require to be taught and Christianized quite as much as the natives.  

–Alfred Russell Wallace, 1865

In a Small Town in Arkansas

 NBC News:

An Arkansas police chief has resigned after he posted messages on a right-wing social media site that appeared to urge people to assault "Marxist" Democrats over the presidential election, the mayor said.

Kevin Elliot, the mayor of Marshall, a city of roughly 1,200 people about 100 miles north of Little Rock, said in a statement Saturday that he "condemned" the comments by Police Chief Lang Holland.

"The Marshall community does not in any way support or condone bullying or threats of violence to anyone of any political persuasion," he said. "We are a welcoming community that is humbly working to build a bright future for ALL our citizens."

Elliot said that after he consulted with lawyers about Holland's posts, which appeared on the site Parler, he met with Holland, who resigned effective immediately.

The posts were no longer visible Sunday, but NBC affiliate KARK of Little Rock published screenshots of some of them.

"When this over and Trump is president for 4 more years," one said, "do not forget what these Marxist bastards have tried to do. When you see one in public get in their face do not give them any peace. Throw water on them at restaurants. Push them off sidewalks. Never let them forget they are traitors and have no right to live in this Republic after what they have done." . . .

Other screenshots posted by the group appeared to show Holland calling the FBI and the CIA "Marxist" organizations working to overthrow the United States.

"Hang all these Marxist Democrats now," the message said.

Both the 2016 and 2020 elections have just been disasters for America, in the sense that they raised emotions to this fever pitch. Let's hope that four years of Biden lowers the temperature, and that the next election features two boring candidates nobody much cares about.

Reactions

 Joe Biden:

Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end here and now. . . . For all those of you who voted for President Trump, I understand the disappointment tonight. I’ve lost a couple times myself. But now, let’s give each other a chance. It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature, see each other again, listen to each other again. This is the time to heal in America. . . .

Americans have called upon us to marshal the forces of decency, the forces of fairness, to marshal the forces of science and the forces of hope in the great battles of our time.

The Washington Post:

Mr. Biden’s victory — and Mr. Trump’s defeat — is a testament to the resilience of American democracy. In other countries, at other times, bullies like Mr. Trump have succeeded in becoming strongmen by promising security from dangerous outsiders, demonizing cultural elites and sowing enough confusion and apathy that people failed to resist the slide into illiberalism. Mr. Trump tried all of these tactics. But Americans resisted. They did so in an overwhelming yet orderly fashion, at the ballot box, when it was their turn to have another say, despite the fact that Mr. Trump and his allies adopted a strategy of disenfranchisement when they realized they could not win fairly. They answered his four years of divisiveness by electing a woman — a woman of color — to be vice-president for the first time in the nation’s history. Citizens in unprecedented numbers stood in line for hours to vote, starting weeks before Election Day. State officials adhered to their responsibilities to ensure that people could cast ballots. Withstanding Mr. Trump’s spiteful and mendacious attacks on their integrity, they ensured that those votes would be counted.

(A question: with Trump on the way out, will the Post change their "Democracy Dies in Darkness" banner?)

Dana Milbank:

Our long national nightmare is over. Donald Trump has lost the presidency. Americans have sent packing the man who made the lives of so many a hell for the past four years with constant chaos, unbridled vitriol and attacks on the foundations of democracy. There may be difficulty in the days ahead because of (gratuitous) court challenges and (baseless) claims of fraud. The rage he has induced in supporters and opponents alike will take time to dissipate. But for a moment, let us rejoice: Our democracy has survived.

A woman in Philadelphia, to CNN:

I’m so happy. I don’t know what to do.

Dartagnan, at Daily Kos:

For those who put us through this hell, nothing will be forgiven, or forgotten.

Yuval Levin:

As the results of the election come gradually into sharper focus, both parties have good reason to be frustrated. Both have been rebuked in some important respects by the electorate. And both rebukes are justified. If the parties are willing to learn from them, the result might be good for our politics.

In a sense, the election epitomizes our era of negative partisanship. Each party ran primarily by highlighting the danger of the other, and the public took both warnings to heart. The Democrats ran against Donald Trump, and look to have persuaded the electorate to dismiss him. The Republicans ran against the increasingly radical Democratic activist base, and look to have persuaded the electorate to reject them. Neither party has gained a mandate, and both are left wondering how they can build a majority coalition in the coming years. That could end up being a constructive question.

Nevada judge Andrew P. Gordon, to a Republican lawyer complaining about access to the ballot counting:

At what point does this get to be ridiculous?

Charles Blow:

Barack Obama — his policies and his posture — just won a third term.

Joe Biden will be president because of his close association with Barack Obama, because he espoused many of the same centrist policies and positioning and because of public nostalgia for the normalcy and decency the Obama years provided.

Ross Douthat on Trumpism after Trump:

Trump was at his most unpopular when he behaved grotesquely and ceded policymaking to the Republican old guard, so his would-be successors need to act less like tinpot tyrants, eschew the ranting and the insults, and also make good on some of the policy promises Trump left by the wayside. A populism 2.0 that doesn’t alienate as many people with its rhetoric, that promises more support for families and domestic industry, that accepts universal health care and attacks monopolies and keeps low-skilled immigration low, all while confronting China and avoiding Middle East entanglements and fighting elite progressivism tooth and nail — there’s your new Republican majority.

Almost 20% of voters said the protests over racial justice and police violence were the most important factor in deciding how they voted:

The protests that broke out after the police killing of George Floyd in May were some of the biggest racial justice marches organized in decades. In the early weeks, polling showed broad and deep support for them across the country.

But as the summer wore on and with it, sporadic looting and acts of vandalism, Americans became much more divided in how they saw the protests.

Just how divided became clear on Election Day.

Alfonse Bowman of Philadelphia said that as he cast his ballot for Joseph R. Biden Jr., he was thinking of how just a week before, the police in his hometown had fatally shot a young Black man. Mr. Bowman, who is Black, said he thought to himself of President Trump: “We have to get this man out of office.”

But Anne Marie Kelly, a white medical worker who lives a couple of hours away in Stroudsburg, Pa., said she was horrified by the vandalism and looting that followed protests in some cities. It made her feel that “this is not the America I want to live in anymore,” and reinforced her resolve to vote for Mr. Trump.

Ex-Democratic Congressman Conor Lamb, asked why Democrats lost house seats:

I’m giving you an honest account of what I’m hearing from my own constituents, which is that they are extremely frustrated by the message of defunding the police and banning fracking. And I, as a Democrat, am just as frustrated. Because those things aren’t just unpopular, they’re completely unrealistic, and they aren’t going to happen. And they amount to false promises by the people that call for them.

If someone in your family makes their living in some way connected to natural gas, whether on the pipeline itself, or you know, even in a restaurant that serves natural gas workers, this isn’t something to joke around about or be casual about in your language.

That’s what we’re trying to say: that the rhetoric and the policies and all that stuff — it has gone way too far. It needs to be dialed back. It needs to be rooted in common sense, in reality, and yes, politics. Because we need districts like mine to stay in the majority and get something done for the people that we care about the most.

Dave Chappelle, on anger:

I know how that feels. I promise you, I know how that feels, Everyone knows how that feels. But here’s the difference between me and you: You guys hate each other for that, and I don’t hate anybody. I just hate that feeling. That’s what I fight through. That’s what I suggest you fight through. You’ve got a find a way to live your life. You’ve got to find a way to forgive each other. You’ve got to find a way to find joy in your existence in spite of that feeling. 

Georgia as a Purple State

As I write the latest count shows that Biden has crept into the lead in Georgia. If that holds up he would be the first Democrat to win the state since Bill Clinton in 1992. But it isn't really surprising, since elections over the past decade have seen Democratic candidates for governor and senator getting ever closer to winning. Right now it looks like both Georgia senate races will go to run-offs, and though Republicans would have the edge in both races they are very close, which shows the state becoming truly competitive again.

As to why, the experts mostly point to demographics. Georgia has about 10 million people, 6 million of whom live in metropolitan Atlanta. The population has more than doubled since 1970, with most of that growth in the Atlanta metro. 

The racial breakdown is about 52% non-Hispanic white, 32% black, 6% Hispanic, 4% Asian; this totals to only 94%, which leaves 600,000 people of other, mostly mixed, ethnicity. 

Besides immigrants from outside the US, Atlanta has had more than a million white and black Americans move there from other states, mostly in the northeast or midwest. It is the black migration back toward the south that attracts my notice, reversing 120 years of movement in the other direction. Those black people move to Atlanta for the same reason white people do, because they think they can make money, but also because it has a large black community that has produced many state and national leaders. It's a place where many black people are thriving, and where racial tensions are fairly muted, certainly no worse than in most northern cities. 

For all intents and purposes, Atlanta is a national or world city like most big places in the US, having more in common with Houston, Indianapolis, or Denver than it does with rural Georgia. Because it so dominates the state, that moves the whole state away from old Dixie and toward national norms. 

Links 6 November 2020

Francesco Morandini, Saint Catherine of Alexandria,  c 1570

Caste-based discrimination in the US. (Washington Post) A friend of mine who is an IT manager once told me that some high-caste people in his company flat-out refuse to work with low-caste colleagues.

Archaeologists find a 9,000-year-old burial in Peru with a big-game hunter's tool kit, that they say is a woman. (NY Times)

Just when you thought we had reached peak photo contest, now comes Weather Photographer of the Year.

In New Zealand, rampaging peacocks.

Irish names for wild animals: jellyfish is ‘Smugairle Róin’, which translates as ‘Seal Snot‘. 

Who helped Japanese Americans resettle after they were released from wartime internment? Churches.

"A garden gives you a picture of what the world could be." In mostly black northwest Milwaukee, a public garden is a place of peace.

With everyone obsessing over the news, the NY Times has added 2 million subscribers this year.

In Japan, you can get a degree in Ninja Studies.

Our ancestors used to see battles in the sky, but we no longer can. Examining a small mystery.

Some thoughts on why Trump did well with Hispanic voters, starting with, most Americans don't see race and racism the way woke intellectuals do.

California went big for Biden but voters rejected a long list of liberal ballot initiatives, including one that would make Uber drivers employees and one that would raise taxes on commercial real estate (NY Times).

Average human body temperature in the US and Europe seems to have declined from the traditional 98.6 Fahrenheit to about 97.5. Possible causes include fewer infections and better climate control. Yet another of the many hints that our bodies and minds are changing in mysterious ways, with who knows what effects. 

Why the Establishment Keeps Underestimating Trump

Some thoughts on why Trump keeps doing better than mainstream pollsters and pundits think he should:

Rich Lowry, editor of National Review:

Trump is, for better or worse, the foremost symbol of resistance to the overwhelming woke cultural tide that has swept along the media, academia, corporate America, Hollywood, professional sports, the big foundations, and almost everything in between.

To put it in blunt terms, for many people, he’s the only middle finger available — to brandish against the people who’ve assumed they have the whip hand in American culture. This may not be a very good reason to vote for a president, and it doesn’t excuse Trump’s abysmal conduct and maladministration.

Michael Sandel, Harvard professor: 

Even though Joe Biden emphasized his working-class roots and sympathies, the Democratic Party continues to be more identified with professional elites and college-educated voters than with the blue-collar voters who once constituted its base. Even so epochal an event as a pandemic, bungled by Trump, did not change this.

Democrats need to ask themselves: Why do many working people embrace a plutocrat-populist whose policies do little to help them? Democrats need to address the sense of humiliation felt by working people who feel the economy has left them behind and that credentialed elites look down on them.

Emma Fitzsimmons on Republican resurgence in the NY suburbs:

While some Republican candidates sought to distance themselves from President Trump, whose popularity was thought to be waning, they still clung to a Trump-like law-and-order message.

They tied Democratic candidates to defunding the police and progressive radicalism in the party, a strategy that seemed to work in many parts of the nation, as Republicans sought to maintain control of the Senate and claw back some House seats. . . .

In particular, many Republican candidates centered their campaigns on accusations that Democrats were undermining public safety, with many citing a bail reform law passed by state lawmakers last year.

“There is a very fine line that separates Republican and Democratic voters in the suburbs, but it seems that bail reform and a general denouncement of law enforcement was the final straw in 2020,” Joseph Borelli, a Republican city councilman from Staten Island, said in an interview on Wednesday.

Indeed, in Central New York, Claudia Tenney, a former Republican congresswoman and close ally of Mr. Trump running to reclaim her seat, harped on that theme in an election night speech; she was leading against Mr. Brindisi, a moderate Democrat who narrowly upset her in 2018.

“We are going to stand up against socialism, against chaos, against looting,” she told her supporters on Tuesday night. “We’re going to defend our police.”

From a Washington Post story on the young black men voting for Trump. There is, first of all, a sense that for all its promises the Democratic establishment just hasn't delivered for black people, and you couldn't find a clearer contrast to the black establishment than Trump:

Trump supporters argue that a vote for Biden is just another vote for a Democrat who talks grandly of helping the Black community but fails to deliver.

I mean, if you grew up in Baltimore and saw one Democratic mayor after another indicted for corruption while nothing around you ever got better, why would you give the party your unqualified support? And then there is Trump's macho swagger, and the way he stands up so boldly to attacks: 

Williams, the comedian and actor, said some Black men are attracted to Trump’s defiance of his critics.

“Barack Obama, when he became president, he showed the world that no matter what color you are, you can become president,” Williams said. “But President Trump, he showed the world that you can be you. You can talk how you want to talk, walk how you want to walk. You don’t have to fit in a box and you can still be the president of the United States of America.”

I agree that Trump's ability to withstand a constant barrage of angry attacks and keep on fighting are a big part of his appeal. Americans love that narrative; think how many celebrity biographies and so on start with "they all tried to put me down but I kept on going and look at me now."

And don't forget that Trump's biggest supporters are evangelical Christians, some of whom admit he is a scumbag but are terrified that liberals are coming for them. This is Rod Dreher a few years ago, explaining why he believed every word Michael Cohen said about Trump but planned to vote for Trump anyway:

The Republicans on the Committee are ripping into Cohen hard on his credibility, or lack thereof. It’s interesting to consider that the Republicans are attacking Cohen for being a scum-sucker for the things he did during the years he was working for Trump. It is certainly true: Michael Cohen is a sleaze. He essentially admits it in testimony, says he’s going to jail, and deserves to. You can say: Why should we believe him now?

Well, read his testimony. It’s 100 percent believable, 100 percent consonant with what we know about Donald Trump’s character. Seriously, read the testimony. Say with a straight face that that doesn’t sound like the Donald we know. Seriously. Come on.

So, you are asking, how could you possibly vote for a man like Trump? The answer is: the moral and political cost of giving power to the other side is even greater. You know why I say that; I’m not going to go into it any further here. We talk about this in some form all the time. It is possible that everything Michael Cohen says today is 100 percent true, and it is still a more moral choice to vote for this immoral man, Trump, rather than for a leader of the party of infanticide, left-wing identity politics, and the rest.

And of course race. Tom Friedman:

The U.S. Census Bureau projects that by the middle of this year, nonwhites will constitute a majority of the nation’s 74 million children. And it is estimated that by sometime in the 2040s, whites will make up 49 percent of the U.S. population, and Latinos, Blacks, Asians and multiracial populations 51 percent.

Among many whites, particularly white working-class males without college degrees, there is clearly a discomfort with the fact, and even a resistance to it, that our nation is in a steady process of becoming “minority white.” They see Trump as a bulwark against the social, cultural and economic implications of that change.

What many Democrats see as a good trend — a country reckoning with structural racism and learning to embrace and celebrate increasing diversity — many white people see as a fundamental cultural threat.

The liberal establishment has gotten wrapped up in a narrative of openness, internationalism, sexual tolerance, anti-racism, and the moral superiority of all of this. But many people are not on board with any of this, and simply pretending that everyone agrees with it, to the point of "de-platforming" contrary voices, is not helping the cause.

Malaise

As I contemplate another election in which polls were off by bewildering margins, in exactly the same way as four years ago, I keep thinking that this is just one sign of a nation that can't do much of anything right. 

Half the highly-touted social science papers of the past 50 years have failed replication. It seems like we either don't have the necessary tools to do social science right, or else social scientists don't care. 

My youngest son recently downloaded an update to his favorite strategy game. I said, "How is it?" He said, "Well, it's interesting, but it crashes every time you click on a fleet." It's an experience so common as to be hardly worth commenting on.

It costs two to five times as much to build a mile of subway here as anywhere else, just one part of a cost nightmare in building any kind of infrastructure.

Our top manufacturer recently decided to murder people with airplane control software. They continue to exist because we need them, and because we think other corporations are just as bad.

We can't educate poor children, even though we spend far more than other nations (Finland, Korea) that do. We can't control drug abuse. Our mentally ill live on the streets, scrounging for survival. 

We find ourselves caught between violent crime that, though way down from its peak, is still more dangerous than in most rich nations, and police departments we don't trust. We have more guns than we have people, far more than we have sense.

Pundits wring their hands over populism and our refusal to trust experts, but, honestly, what have experts gotten right lately? If they can't poll an election properly, why should we trust them about things that are far more complex, like the climate or regulating banks?

Yes, we're really good at some things, but many of them are things I and many others wish we weren't so good at: fracking, search engines driven by online advertising, cheap sugary food, hypersonic missiles, toy submarines for billionaires.

We fall for one fad after another: new math, back to basics math, Common Core math. The matrix corporation, the team-based corporation, the virtual corporation, the customer-focused corporation, the solutions-focused corporation. Litany after litany of irrelevance and failure.

I'm not saying, mind you, that things used to be better, although some things surely were. But is this really the best we can do? What is the knowledge we need, or have lost, to put competence at the center of our work?

I think our incentives are askew. We are rewarded for shallow, flashy successes, for "bold initiatives" and achievements that can fill a line item on a monthly brag sheet, for things that sound like "change." The like button and the viral video are metaphors for our whole world: one post that strikes a chord and gets ten million views, no matter how mediocre, no matter how wrong or distorted, matters more than all the careful research or deep thought you could produce in a lifetime. TL/DR to that.

I feel right now a great desire to see some big, public thing done really, really well.

Distractions

Deus ex machina from a 2009 performance of Euripides in Syracuse, Sicily

The story of Michael Zittle, the Wizard of South Mountain, a local Maryland hedge witch who published a book of spells in 1845 titled (in German), A Friend in Need, or, Secret Science. 

Ben Pentreath photographs Autumn in Scotland, amazingly beautiful.

Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Faeries, 1692. Watch a rational man who believed in faeries try to make sense of all the stories he has heard for read about them.

The Illustrators' Archive. Peruse hundreds of illustrations from classic masters of book art.

The Hermitage. Explore the collection or take a virtual walk through the museum.

No Brash Festivity, an always-entertaining collection of mostly modern art.

Classical Monuments, where each post is a collection of photos, drawings, and text about an ancient monument or city.

Scotland from Above, 25-minute video. Part of a whole series. And if you get bored with Scotland, here's Italy.

Be well, everyone.

New Exercise Tricks

 BBC:

It might have been one of my regular runs around the streets of Singapore, but the experience was spiced with danger.

I was the hero in my very own spy story, speeding from one checkpoint to another to foil the bad guys.

The plot came from a running app called Running Stories, which casts you as a secret agent in a story playing out with a heart-thumping soundtrack.

It is one of the latest apps designed to make exercise more entertaining, using real-time data that integrates the plot with your surroundings.

Key events in the storyline are triggered when a runner passes specific GPS markers and landmarks.

From being shot at by snipers to racing to catch a speedboat along the river, the plot kept me engaged and burned plenty of calories.

Despite the scorching sun, I managed to complete the mission, save the day and fight the flab.

I've often wondered if I could make any money setting up real-world adventures like this, sort of like fancy treasure hunts. I would certainly enjoy doing it.

Today's Place to Daydream about: Bern, Switzerland

How about we imagine ourselves in the sort of placid backwater where nothing much has happened in the past 400 years? Like, say, Bern, the fifth largest city in Switzerland. It is on my mind because I just listened to a Cold War spy thriller where the climax featured an outdoor chess game in Bern, and the description made the town seem both lovely and boring. Just what I need.

Old Bern sits within a bend of the River Aare. It is not an ancient place, but one of the new towns of the high Middle Ages; according to one chronicle it was founded in 1191, which is probably not far off. Now the town has spread well beyond the old walls and has a population of about 144,000.

Bern in 1638, a delightful old map. Bern was one of the original eight cantons of the Swiss Confederacy, formed in the 14th century, and its soldiers fought in all the battles of the struggle for Swiss independence.

Bern suffered a terrible fire in 1405, and much of what you see in the old town today dates to the great rebuilding that took place after the fire.

Bern has a wonderful cathedral built in 1425-1575, but I wrote about it back in 2013 so I won't say much here. The Dance of Death window (1441-1450) is very famous, as is the painted sculpture of the Last Judgment over the main entrance. Bern was a very early convert to Protestantism, and was in fact part of the reform movement even before Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door in Württemberg. According to one version the cathedral had a reformist preacher by 1515, but he was driven out in 1524 as Orthodox Catholicism reasserted itself in the reaction against Luther. But the city was struck by a plague the very next year, which led to city fathers to chase out their bishop and invite reformer Ulrich Zwingli to preach there. Much of the cathedral's sculpture was removed by the reformers, but the Last Judgment remains.

Bern's other famous old monument is the Zytglogge or clock tower. This was part of the city wall in the thirteenth century, but then in the fourteenth century the wall was moved farther out and this tower was stranded in the middle of the city. It served for a while as the women's prison. It was gutted in the great fire of 1405 and then rebuilt as a clock tower. 

The original mechanism was wooden and had to be replaced in 1530 with this steel movement, which is still in operation.

The various moving figures on the outside were added to over the years but now include a parade of bears, a jester, and Chronos, the God of Time.

More views of the old city.

Albert Einstein lived here in 1903-1905, at the peak of his creative powers, and the Einsteins' apartment is now a museum. I have always been struck by how many of the great geniuses of the 1850-1914 period lived and dressed in the most conformist bourgeois way. People like Einstein, Freud, Rilke, Kandinsky, and so on dressed exactly like bank clerks and had exactly the same furniture. Very different from the post-World War II generation, which felt the need to advertise their avante-garde status in their homes and wardrobes.

A famous park called the Rose Garden overlooks the old city from across the river, providing wonderful views. Most of the pictures online show any sort of flower but roses.

Scattered around the old town are eleven allegorical sculptures, most dating to the 16th century; most famous is the Kindlifresserbrunnen, the Eater of Children.

The Piper. Wandering around Bern looking for statues and popping into cafes seems like the sort of thing that might distract me from everything else and turn even today into a fun day.

EID MAR

 

A coin minted by Brutus (Et tu, Brute?) during his Civil War against Octavian in 42 BC, stamped with EID MAR to commemorate the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, just sold for $3.5 million, a new record for a Roman coin. The coin was unknown to the world until the sale was announced. Some collectors love coins partly because they are small and secret, and many of the world's most valuable coins are in unpublished collections.

This set me thinking about how much we really know about Roman history. For some episodes we have only a single narrative work, and when there are more they may all be derived from some single lost source. What if that source made it up? But really there are many other sources we can turn to, at least for public, official acts. The Romans were of course always carving inscriptions on things, many of which mention emperors and their acts. They issued millions of coins, some of them to commemorate particular victories or other events. And by and large these sources confirm what we read in Tacitus or Livy. The staggering physical remains of the empire, all those roads, walls, forts, triumphal arches and so on also confirm the basic story. This gives me a lot more confidence that what we read in the histories is true.

Incidentally the previous record holder for a Roman coin was this sestertius of Hadrian, just a little brass coin, but look and at amazing artistry of his portrait. The reverse shows the goddess of peace. This is a memento of the empire at its height, when the Pax Romana spanned the western world. For me, at least, that is its real value. Those things happened; they are stories beyond our imaginings, but they are real.

How an Octopus Tastes with its Limbs

 Katherine Wu in the Times:

Scientists have known for years that octopuses can taste what their arms touch. Now, a team of Harvard biologists armed with bricks, Velcro and an array of genetic tools has cracked some of the code behind this feel-and-feed feat.

The cells of octopus suckers are decorated with a mixture of tiny detector proteins. Each type of sensor responds to a distinct chemical cue, giving the animals an extraordinarily refined palate that can inform how their agile arms react, jettisoning an object as useless or dangerous, or nabbing it for a snack.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Cell, “really nails the molecular basis for a new sensory system,” said Rebecca Tarvin, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who wrote a commentary on the findings but was not involved in the research. “This was previously kind of a black box.”

Though humans have nothing quite comparable in their anatomy, being an octopus might be roughly akin to exploring the world with eight giant, sucker-studded tongues, said Lena van Giesen, the study’s lead author. “Or maybe it feels totally different,” she said. “We just don’t know.”

The internal architecture of an octopus is as labyrinthine as it is bizarre. Nestled inside each body are three hearts, a parrot-like beak and, arguably, nine “brains” — a central hub with an octo-entourage of nerve cell clusters, one in each of the animal’s eight arms. Imbued with their own neurons, octopus arms can act semi-autonomously, gathering and exchanging information without routing it through the main brain. 

Links 30 October 2020

Rag doll from Hawara, Egypt, c. 350-160 BC, wool, flax, and human hair.

People are repainting their houses in the "quarantine palate", colors that many seem to find soothing.

Glorious 4-minute video of dry ice pieces being dropped into water, weirdly, amazingly beautiful.

How to talk to people who are falling for conspiracy theories (NY Times)

Kevin Drum responds to critics of his post arguing that American democracy is not in crisis, which I wrote about here.

Experts To Western States: Time To Finally Fight Wildfires With More Fire (NPR)

So you want to regulate Facebook and Twitter; did you mean regulate them like phone companies, or like broadcast television?

3-minute video using 3d animation to explain how large bridges were built in the Middle Ages; I wish they had shown the arch construction in more detail, but still quite cool.

Paul Krugman tries to explain why Trump's tariffs did not help US manufacturing, somewhat technical but not polemical. One issue is that in our economy staggering amounts of money flow across borders, and companies have mainly responded to Trump's tax and tariff changes by moving money rather than manufacturing operations.

"Captain" Roger Gallagher, famous highwayman of Ireland's County Mayo, who stole from the English rich and gave some of it to the Irish poor.

Is Palantir a scary threat to privacy and democracy, or a faddish, money-losing company with a bad business model? (NY Times)

Huge, zoomable image of a telescope photograph that shows 10 million stars.

Very wealthy neighbors feuding like spoiled children; admit it, you love these stories

Why Amazon has such a big problem with people bribing its employees.

NY Times story on geoengineering to fight climate change, which makes it sound like a lot is being done, until you look at the pathetic budget numbers.

The mysterious strategy of the "nuclear sponge": according to testimony by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, the main purpose of the hundreds of nuclear-armed ICBMs we keep in silos across the plains is to "soak up" nuclear attacks from our enemies, luring fire away from New York and Los Angeles. We have no plans to fire them. But we're about to spend $95 billion replacing them with newer missiles we also have no plans to fire.

The history of dogs, from their DNA. One weird fact is that no wolf DNA has entered the dog genome since domestication more than 15,000 years ago, so huskies are no more wolf than pugs (NY Times)

According to a leaked document, somebody in the Trump administration thinks Billie Eilish is "destroying our country and everything we care about." Pretty impressive accomplishment for a teenage pop star.

Women of color running for Congress as Republicans (Washington Post)

Long NY Times story on the Epoch Times, a right-wing rag owned by the Falun Gong movement.

Books bound in human skin.

The Perils of Stripping away Illusion

After decades spent trying to get Americans to confront the country's crimes, Wallace Shawn find that the results of greater honesty are not what he hoped for:

Now that I’m seventy-six, when I remember the way I used to feel—when I think about how important it once seemed to me to tell people the truth about the crimes in which we all were implicated—well, that all seems quaint and sad. It turns out that by the time the American public learned the sorts of things I’d felt they needed to learn, by the time they came to look in the mirror, what they saw there didn’t look so bad to them. And so, yes, an awful lot of people don’t get upset when they hear Trump talk.

On the contrary, they seem to feel a great sense of relief. Trump has liberated a lot of people from the last vestiges of the Sermon on the Mount. A lot of people turn out to have been sick and tired of pretending to be good. The fact that the leader of one of our two parties—the party, in fact, that has for many decades represented what was normal, acceptable, and respectable—was not ashamed to reveal his own selfishness, was not ashamed to reveal his own indifference to the suffering of others, was not even ashamed to reveal his own cheerful enjoyment of cruelty…all of this helped people to feel that they no longer needed to be ashamed of those qualities in themselves either. They didn’t need to feel bad because they didn’t care about other people. Maybe they didn’t want to be forbearing toward enemies. Maybe they didn’t want to be gentle or kind.

I worry about this, too. If you convince people that their ancestors were not the noble heroes they imagine, but were in fact guilty of violence, racism, and sundry other barbarities, some of them will not turn against their ancestors. Instead, they will decide that violence, racism and barbarity are good things.

In general, attacking people is a terrible way to change them. It almost always makes them double down in defense of themselves and their kind. I firmly believe that nothing helps Trump and his ilk more than constant criticism of "white people."

Inspiring people to do better is the only way, if possible by pointing out their ancestors' virtues and calling on them to build on that past. That's what FDR did, and Martin Luther King, and Barack Obama. It's how the leaders of Swedish socialism and the British Labour Party created the modern welfare state in the 1940s and 1950s. Not by criticizing people, but by appealing to the best in people, and the best in their past.

The History of Parenting Advice

Times reporter Jessica Grose waded back through the paper's archives to see what sort of advice it had printed for parents:

In the ’30s and ’40s, The Times had a parenting writer named Catherine Mackenzie, whose columns dealt with issues we’re still mulling, like how much kids should be learning in preschool, whether new kinds of media are harmful to children, and what to do when 13-year-old girls want to wear lipstick and go on dates. . . .

But the most revealing article I read was from 1952. It was a summary of the work of Clark E. Vincent, a graduate teaching assistant in sociology at the University of California, who had surveyed thousands of articles from the previous 60 years of infant care and child-rearing advice.

Vincent noted that the breast vs. bottle “controversy” has been around since Hippocrates, and that much of parenting advice is trend-driven. “In 1890 women’s magazines recommended ‘loose scheduling’; in 1920 they were all for the tight schedule, ‘cry it out’ routine, and in the last year analyzed, 1948, all were for ‘self regulation’ by the baby,” the article noted.

According to Vincent, parenting advice has “often reflected changing patterns of thought in middle-class society, and changing theories of education and personality transformation.” His ultimate takeaway? Less dogmatism and more flexibility, “so long as the baby’s needs are satisfied.” Maybe if we keep giving this advice for the next 70 years — that there’s no one way to parent, that kids can thrive in many different situations — it will finally stick. 

Swordfish Swords

Nautical folklore has always been full of swordfish using their long bills as weapons. Sailors have long reported seeing swordfish drive their swords through boat hulls, kill people and each other, and so on. But over the past century scientists have been skeptical. Yes, there are confirmed cases of swords stuck through boat hulls, but maybe those were accidents; the swords just don't seem like they would make very effective weapons, and there isn't much video or other evidence to confirm sword attacks. Until recently, anyway:

The first victim washed up in September 2016. The police in Valencia, Spain, saw a blue shark dying in the surf along a tiny stretch of beach. They lugged the eight-foot corpse to the yard behind the police station. Then they called Jaime Penadés-Suay, who soon suspected foul play.

The shark had what looked like a bit of wood embedded in her head. He pulled. Out slid a broken fragment from a swordfish sword that had lanced straight through her brain.

“I thought it was crazy,” said Mr. Penadés-Suay, a graduate student at the University of Valencia and a founder of LAMNA, a Spanish consortium that studies sharks. “I was never sure if this was some kind of joke.”

But since then at least six more sharks have washed up on Mediterranean coasts, each impaled with the same murder weapon, and almost always in the head. In the latest example, an adult 15-foot thresher shark — itself equipped with a whiplike tail capable of stunning blows — washed up in Libya. Inside was a foot of swordfish sword that had broken off near its heart.

Taken together these cases offer what may be preliminary scientific evidence of high-speed, high-stakes underwater duels that had previously been confined to fisherman’s tales.

Awesome. File this beside the evidence that thresher sharks really use their long tails as weapons, too.

Giving Money to Homeless People

Vox covers a new Canadian study of how to help homeless people:

The study, conducted by the charity Foundations for Social Change in partnership with the University of British Columbia, was fairly simple. It identified 50 people in the Vancouver area who had become homeless in the past two years. In spring 2018, it gave them each one lump sum of $7,500 (in Canadian dollars). And it told them to do whatever they wanted with the cash.

“At first, I thought it was a little far-fetched — too good to be true,” Ray said. “I went with one of the program representatives to a bank and we opened up a bank account for me. Even after the money was there, it took me a week for it to sink in.”

Over the next year, the study followed up with the recipients periodically, asking how they were spending the money and what was happening in their lives. Because they were participating in a randomized controlled trial, their outcomes were compared to those of a control group: 65 homeless people who didn’t receive any cash. Both cash recipients and people in the control group got access to workshops and coaching focused on developing life skills and plans.

The results? The people who received cash transfers moved into stable housing faster and saved enough money to maintain financial security over the year of follow-up. They decreased spending on drugs, tobacco, and alcohol by 39 percent on average, and increased spending on food, clothes, and rent, according to self-reports.

Plenty of other studies have shown that some homeless people can see their lives turned around by a one-time generous intervention, like cash or a free apartment. You can imagine how this happens: becoming homeless can be part of a downward spiral, losses or failures, leading to depression or binge-drinking that leads to further losses and failures. A big intervention can get some people out of that spiral and help them get back on track. This study also found what some others have, that these interventions more than pay for themselves in things like reduced hospital visits.

Unfortunately the story is more complicated than that. For one thing this study strictly limited the pool of eligible people:

The study only enrolled participants who’d been homeless for under two years, with the idea that early intervention most effectively reduces the risk of people incurring trauma as a result of living without a home. And people with severe mental health or substance use issues were screened out of the initiative.

Those are precisely the people most likely to stay homeless over the long haul; people without addictions or other severe mental health problems are the ones mostly likely to get themselves out of trouble without help. So, yeah, it's always easiest to help the most promising cases.

Again, these interventions seem to pay for themselves, and they certainly help some people get back on their feet a lot faster, so I'm all for them. But there is no long-term solution to our homelessness problem without much better mental health care and addiction treatment.