Russian Coup, continued

Situation as of 7:30 AM Eastern Time:

Rebellious Wagner troops have taken Rostov-on-Don, including the headquarters of the Russian Southern Military District. Rostov is a major logistics hub for the army in Ukraine. The regime deployed Rosgvardia (national guard) troops on the roads into Rostov but videos show them standing aside to let Wagner troops pass. 

Wagner troops have also taken Voronezh.

Online reports have the rebels holding all the area shown in purple. There appears to be no resistance from regular army troops; only FSB (= old KGB) troops are shooting at Wagner.

The Russian air force is fighting back but they have already lost two helicopters and one jet. (Wagner forces have surface to air missiles.) (UPDATE 8:30; the fuel depot may have been struck by an anti-aircraft missile fired by Wagner.) They bombed the fuel depot in Voronezh, presumably to keep the fuel out of Wagner's hands. Progozhin has claimed that some pilots refused to attack his men, but there is no other confirmation of that.

At least a dozen private jets are said to have left Moscow without posting destinations to air traffic control.

Putin has made a touch speech, denouncing Prigozhin as a traitor. But Prigozhin was not impressed:

No one is going to confess at the request of the president, the FSB or anyone else. Because we do not want the country to continue to live in corruption, deception and bureaucracy.

The government in Moscow has declared an anti-terror regime, which amounts to martial law. They are blocking roads into Moscow with buses and cement trucks.

Statements of support for Prigozhin are starting to come out from other Russian commanders.

This is a real coup, and it may lead to a real Russian civil war.

Tendarr, retired German officer on Twitter:

I have said this for years: Putin's last sacrifice will be his own people. This is the final terror. . . . You will remember this day.

Zelensky:

Everyone who chooses the path of evil destroys himself. Who sends troops to destroy the life of another country and cannot stop them from fleeing and betraying when that life resists. Who terrorizes with missiles is humiliated when they are shot down. Who despises people and throws hundreds of thousands into the war, will eventually have to barricade himself in Moscow from those whom he himself armed. For a long time, Russia used propaganda to mask its weakness and the stupidity of its government, but now there is so much chaos that no lie can hide it. And all this stems from one person, who again and again frightens people by invoking the year 1917. This is the result. Russia's weakness is obvious. Full-scale weakness. And the longer Russia keeps its troops and mercenaries on our land, the more chaos, pain, and problems it will have for itself.

Russian news anchor Solovyov:

Every kingdom, if it is torn apart by strife, will be desolate, and every city or house where there is strife will not stand. (and more here)

Machiavelli:

Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is.

Ukrainian troops are trolling the heck out of this.

And pro-Ukrainian internet forces are letting their pro-Russian opponents have it.

A Coup in Russia?

Statement from Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagern mercenary group:

The current situation: today, we were dealt a missile strike. After this strike, helicopters did their work. Then, artillery.

The orders were coming from the Head of General Staff to destroy PMC Wagner. After a meeting with the Minister of Defence Shoygu where they made this decision - to destroy the rebellious units, who are ready to defend the motherland, but not their asses.

As of now, we’ve crossed the state borders in all areas. Border guards came towards us and hugged our fighters.

Now, we’re entering Rostov. Units of the Ministry of Defence, in fact, the conscripts who were thrown to block our path, moved away.

We do not fight with children. We do not kill children. Shoygu is killing children by throwing untrained soldiers, conscripts included, into the war.

He set up 18-year-old lads against us. They’re like children and grandchildren to us. Therefore, these lads will live and return to their mothers.

We only fight with professionals. But if someone stands in our path, we will destroy EVERYTHING in our way.

We lend a hand to anyone. No need to spit in this hand. We are moving forward, going to the end.

Regarding claims regarding the arrest: this brotherhood, this justice, this honour, this conscience is what we have. But when you make these claims, you haven’t got these feelings. These feelings are destroyed. Thus, you cannot understand anything but betrayal.

So far no video shows that anybody is marching anywhere, but a lot of extra troops and police have deployed around the MOD in Moscow, roads toward Moscow have been blocked, and the state prosecutor issued a warrant for Prigozhin's arrest on charges of rebellion. So official Moscow is taking the threat seriously. The rest of us are getting out the popcorn.

Links 23 June 2023

Takeuchi Seihō (1864 - 1942), bear in the snow

Orcas frolicking in Monterey Bay; Facebook video, news article.

The State of Pennsylvania is livestreaming the rebuilding of I-95 in Philadelphia on Twitter, and thousands of people have watched; some have stayed on the feed all day. Reminds me of the crowd of hundreds who came to watch the installation of the biggest beams in the new overpass at the I-95/I-495 interchange south of Washington.

The NY Times reports major advances in treating metastatic cancer. New immunotherapy drugs are giving many patients decades of life.

Excavation of Bronze Age barrows on the Salisbury Plain, not far from Stonehenge.

The never-ending battle over whether psychiatrists should ignore politics or encourage their patients to join the resistance, this time over Israel/Palestine.

Tyler Cowen interviews Noam Chomsky. Chomsky's vision is remarkably consistent, for good or ill.

I love the NY Times obituary for Cormac McCarthy, with a great overview of his writing.

Roman mausoleum uncovered in London.

I just discovered that Horatio Alger,  author of all those rags-to-riches stories that left a weird imprint on the American psyche, was a minister forced out of his church after he was accused of abusing boys. (NY Times) It's getting to where I am suspicious of any man who takes a strong interest in children.

Until recently historians thought the largest slave auction in US history was the "Weeping Time," the 1859 auction of 436 people in Georgia; but now it appears that a sale of around 600 slaves was held in South Carolina in 1835, part of the estate sale of John Ball, Jr. The difference between the fame of the two events shows the progress of abolitionism; by 1859 abolitionists were well enough organized to make sure that nobody could ignore such an event.

Archaeologists think they have confirmed the location of the Indian village on Roanoke Island where the colonists were feasted in 1584.

One of my vague fears about parenthood was that children raised without any religious identity might have some kind of adolescent or early adult crisis and join a cult. But my children seem to be entirely comfortable with having no church, and experts consulted for this NY Times story agree that "secular, anti-religious or nonreligious people are producing nonreligious, anti-religious children."

We need more power lines: "recent analyses conclude that the United States could reach net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 at relatively low cost using currently available technologies . . . [but] integrating these renewables would require a large expansion in transmission to deliver that power."

Short Brian Eno essay on the language of smell, from 1992.

Ukraine Links

If you're interested in the role drones are playing in Ukraine and whether NATO is ready for that level of drone combat, check out this 2020 article on how the US Army responded to the threat from ISIL drones in Iraq and Syria: "The daunting task ahead does not diminish the fact that ISIL’s small drones failed to successfully strike U.S. ground forces despite hundreds of attempts." Cheap drones are not superweapons and I suspect they have been effective in Ukraine in large part because both sides are too distracted by dealing with other problems to focus on defeating them. 

And here is a fairly long and detailed article on the drone arms race in Ukraine. Interesting that anti-drone drones get a lot of play.

Intense video of trench combat.

Mediazona's confirmed count of Russian dead has passed 25,000 and has lately been rising at 500/week.

Thread assessing Russian morale, says units in the south are not anywhere close to cracking. Threadreader here.

Igor Girkin says Russia has completely lost the initiative and has "no chance of winning."

Over the past year the US has been able to increase production of 155mm artillery shells from 14,000 per month to 24,000. The goal is 80,000 per month. 

"In its early phases, Ukraine’s counteroffensive is having less success and Russian forces are showing more competence than western assessments expected, two western officials and a senior US military official tell CNN. The counteroffensive is 'not meeting expectations on any front,' one of the officials said."

Prigozhin's rants are getting more and more dangerous, either for him or for Putin.

Did the Pentagon really make a "$6.2 billion accounting error," or did Biden order them to find more money for Ukraine somewhere?

No Fallen Age

The folks who published that study showing moral decline is an illusion have a new op-ed in the NY Times:

We first collected 235 surveys with over 574,000 responses total and found that, overwhelmingly, people believe that humans are less kind, honest, ethical and moral today than they were in the past. People have believed in this moral decline at least since pollsters started asking about it in 1949, they believe it in every single country that has ever been surveyed (59 and counting), they believe that it’s been happening their whole lives and they believe it’s still happening today. Respondents of all sorts — young and old, liberal and conservative, white and Black — consistently agreed: The golden age of human kindness is long gone.

We also found strong evidence that people are wrong about this decline. We assembled every survey that asked people about the current state of morality: “Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?” “Within the past 12 months, have you volunteered your time to a charitable cause?”,“How often do you encounter incivility at work?” Across 140 surveys and nearly 12 million responses, participants’ answers did not change meaningfully over time. When asked to rate the current state of morality in the United States, for example, people gave almost identical answers between 2002 and 2020, but they also reported a decline in morality every year.

Other researchers’ data have even shown moral improvement. Social scientists have been measuring cooperation rates between strangers in lab-based economic games for decades, and a recent meta-analysis found — contrary to the authors’ expectations — that cooperation has increased 8 percentage points over the last 61 years. When we asked participants to estimate that change, they mistakenly thought cooperation rates had decreased by 9 percentage points. Others have documented the increasing rarity of the most heinous forms of human immorality, like genocide and child abuse.

These researchers attribute this to all the terrible news we hear and read about other people, which leads us to think that our contemporaries are awful, and to the natural tendency to romanticize our past.

Forest Fires in Eastern Canada

If somebody tries to tell you that the Canadian wildfires are caused by climate change – like this essay at the NY Times – refer them to these, sent to me by a friend who is researching the ecological history of Labrador. This is only a sample of the material he has accumulated. Those forests burned all the time even during the coldest decades of the Little Ice Age.

In 1661, the Jesuits Gabriel Druillettes and Claude Dablon traveled by canoe up the Saguenay as far as  Lac Nicabau and reported: 

Nothing beautiful, nothing attractive is to be seen here —the soil being dry, barren, and sandy, and the mountains covered only with rocks, or with little stunted trees. . . . The air here is almost always brown with smoke, caused by the burning of the surrounding woods, which, catching fire all at once within a circuit of fifteen and twenty leagues, have sent us their ashes from more than ten leagues' distance. For this reason, we have but rarely enjoyed the beauty of a cloudless Sun, it having always appeared to us veiled by those clouds of smoke —and sometimes to such a degree that the most Perfect Solar eclipses do not render air, earth, and herbage more gloomy and somber. These fires —which are very common here for a month or two in the Summer, and as a result of which we have seen many forests wholly composed of charred wood —keep the atmosphere so very warm, and make it so stifling, that it is difficult to live in it.

Jesuit Father François de Crépieul went up the Saguenay in the winter of 1673-4. In the first week of December, he was camped near Lake St. John: 

About this time there was a very noticeable earthquake near us. I had still further opportunity, during our journey, to observe the extraordinary ravages of the terrible earthquake that took place some years ago in these wild regions. There may also be seen the recent traces which cruel fires have left in these vast forests. The Savages say that they have spread over more than two hundred leagues.

And here is an 1842 description of the landscape inland from Hamilton Inlet: 

… in looking down from the brow of some more elevated hill, an interminable succession of naked hills and lakes is seen, giving an indescribable aspect of desolation to the country, which is greatly heightened by the effects of the fires that have ravaged the whole country. Indeed, there can be but little doubt, that at one time nearly, if not the whole, of the interior of Labrador was covered with wood, which has since been destroyed by fire; in almost every direction, the naked stumps of trees are seen, rising out of the moss that now covers the country. Hundreds of miles of the country are now nothing but a barren waste of naked rock from this cause, which in the recollection of some of the old hunters were covered with wood formerly.

Very dark days, because of smoke from distant fires, were reported from New England in 1706, 1716, 1732, 1780 (when May 19 was called Black Friday or The Dark Day), 1785, 1814, 1819, 1836, 1881 and 1894. The number of such days declined in the 20th century, most likely because intensive logging thinned out the forests, so in a sense the return of Dark Days shows that the forests are returning to something more like their natural cycle.

Certain landscapes just burn on a regular basis, and the only way to prevent really big fires is to encourage lots of little ones.

Destruction in Rykove

Crazy before and after satellite photographs of the June 18 missile attack on a major Russian arms depot in Rykove, in Kherson Oblast just northeast of Crimea. A whole warehouse complex simply vanished, along with a stretch of railroad tracks. That's the main railroad connecting Russia to Crimea so its loss, even for a few weeks, is a pretty big deal.

 

Rykove is here.

Below, photographs of the explosion and the remains of the complex.

Genetic History of the Balkans

Romans on the Danube, from Trajan's column

New paper by Olalde et al., "Cosmopolitanism at the Roman Danubian Frontier, Slavic Migrations, and the Genomic Formation of Modern Balkan Peoples." Abstract: 

The Roman Empire expanded through the Mediterranean shores and brought human mobility and cosmopolitanism across this inland sea to an unprecedented scale. However, if this was also common at the Empire frontiers remains undetermined. The Balkans and Danube River were of strategic importance for the Romans acting as an East-West connection and as a defense line against “barbarian” tribes. We generated genome-wide data from 70 ancient individuals from present-day Serbia dated to the first millennium CE; including Viminacium, capital of Moesia Superior province. Our analyses reveal large scale-movements from Anatolia during Imperial rule, similar to the pattern observed in Rome, and cases of individual mobility from as far as East Africa. Between ∼250-500 CE, we detect gene-flow from Central/Northern Europe harboring admixtures of Iron Age steppe groups. Tenth-century CE individuals harbored North-Eastern European-related ancestry likely associated to Slavic-speakers, which contributed >20% of the ancestry of today’s Balkan people. 

So they find three major population changes in the Classical and Medieval Balkans:

1. The arrival of people from eastern Mediterranean, who moved across the late Republic and early Empire by the hundreds of thousands, either as slaves or in search of opportunity.
2. Invaders who carried genes from the West Asian/East European steppes arriving between 250 and 500 AD; these are presumably Goths, Vandals, Gepids, Heruli, and sundry other barbarians.
3. Slavs, arriving between 500 and 900 AD, who contribute 20 percent of the genes of modern Balkan peoples.

If you were thinking of asking where the Slavs came from, well, 

The Slavs, who raided the Balkans during the 6th century and settled in the region in the 7th century, had a particularly long-lasting cultural impact, reflected in the Slavic languages widely spoken in the region today. . . . Even present-day Peloponnesians carry a small yet significant amount of Slavic-related ancestry, but the ultimate origin of Slavic speakers and the degree of demographic impact in the region is not yet well understood.

A few caveats. First, the study is based on only 52 high quality DNA profiles, all of which come from three sites in Serbia. That's not a great data set for writing the whole history of the Balkans. (And two of them were identical twins, buried side by side.)

But for what's it's worth, this data matches closely with both the traditional narrative of Balkan history and the findings of recent genetic studies of the Roman empire. It is clear now that the establishment of the empire led to a great deal of movement between the eastern and western Mediterranean areas, and also north to south, with Africans found in Britain and Gauls in Egypt. For the people in the current study dated to between 1 and 250 AD, around half were mostly Anatolian or Syrian in their ancestry, while the rest were mainly descended from the local Iron Age folk. There were three exceptions, two men who proably came from northwestern Europe and one from Sudan or Ethiopia.

From 250 to 500 AD there was much less eastern Mediterranean ancestry, so those people either left or dwindled. Local Iron Age ancestry remained common. The new factor was several people carrying genes from northern Europe (resembling known Lombard graves) and others with components that resemble Sarmatians from the steppes. This matches with other modern genetic studies, which show evidence of major migrations from the north and northeast, enough people to leave clear genetic signatures in the medieval and modern populations.

Five individuals buried in the early 900s showed what is probably Slavic ancestry, with generally west Asian genes and Y-chromosomes from the group called I2-L621, which is common in modern Slavs but not found in Europe before the early Middle Ages.

This figure shows data from modern populations, with the black representing genes from northern or northeastern Europe (Goths. Lombards, Sarmatians, Slavs) and the white everything else. You can clearly see that the amount of northern and steppes DNA declines as you move south, just as you might expect. The tenth-century people from this study are outlined in red, showing that they fit fairly well into the modern gradient. 

The important lesson is that we humans are a species on the move, always migrating, invading, slave-trading, and otherwise mixing up our genes with spectacular abandon.

Men

Ross Douthat notes the recent deaths of Ted Kaczynski, Silvio Berlusconi, and Cormac McCarthy with a meditation on men in the contemporary world (NY Times):

There is a lot of talk lately about a crisis of manhood, manifest in statistics showing young men falling behind young women in various indicators of education and ambition, answered from the left by therapeutic attempts to detoxify masculinity and from the right by promises of masculine revival. The root of the problem seems clear enough, even if the solutions are contested: The things that men are most adapted for (or socialized for, if you prefer that narrative) are valued less, sometimes much less, in the peacetime of a postindustrial civilization than in most of the human past.

In a phrase, when we talk about traditional modes of manhood, we’re often talking about mastery through physical strength and the capacity for violence. That kind of mastery will always have some value, but it had more value in 1370 than 1870, and more in 1870 than it does today. And the excess, the superfluity, must therefore be repressed, tamed or somehow educated away.

I raise this because this is now a commonplace view in our society, and it is always worth asking, every once in a while, whether our commonplaces are true.

I would start with some a basic corrections. First, violence and hard labor are not the traditional role for all men, but specifically for young men; consider the image brought to your mind by the words "tribal elder."

Second, the traditional dichotomy between men's and women's work is only partly about strength; much of it is about whether the work is done within the home or outside it. Women's work was traditionally constrained to what they could do while caring for babies or small children, which meant staying close to home. Work that involved being away from home, especially for long periods – hunting, fishing, lumbering, trading – was done by men. There are plenty of societies in which all farming is done by women, even when it involves hard labor like digging up cassava roots. Hunting with a bow or blowgun, by contrast, is often more about stealth than strength.

Another idea you see a lot these days is that women have an advantage in the modern workplace because they are more agreeable and therefore have better interpersonal skills. But to that I say that being agreeable is just one mode of interaction, and being aggressive also has advantages in a lot of work situations: negotiation, high pressure sales, boot camp-style training, climbing the corporate ladder.

I could go on for a while, but let me make just one more point: ever since we started making machines, all the way back to the first wheeled carts, the mechanical has mainly been the province of men.

All of that is to say that I am not convinced that teenage boys are lagging in school because of a genetic program that says they should be out hunting buffalo. I think we need to look at much narrower and more specific disconnects. I don't want to sound dogmatic about anything I am going to say on this topic, because I regard it all as complex and confusing. But I have toyed with a few ideas.

I think the problem boys have with school is specifically about school as we now organize it. First, school is all about sitting still, and sitting still is certainly torture for many boys. (And not a few girls.) It also tends to be abstract, and many boys have a particularly preference for the concrete. And no, it is not true that the modern workplace demands a lot of abstract thinking skills; the biggest problem I and my more intellectual work friends have had with corporate life is that it demands an obsession with concrete details and waves off anything that might pass for real thought. My own work involves a lot of writing, but I work all the time with highly paid engineers and managers who can barely write a sentence, let alone a report. There are in fact many successful CEOs and corporate founders who are so dyslexic they have trouble reading. So I wonder if maybe a different way of organizing school might help more boys succeed at it.

But the thing that keeps looming up in my mind is the question of rewards. What if boys do worse in school, and young men worse in the workplace, because they don't see the point? Because the rewards we offer "successful" people don't appeal to them? Because a life of bourgeois discipline leading to a nice hourse or apartment with nice furniture and a wife with her own career doesn't seem like much of a goal? Part of my interest in such notions comes out of my own experience as a parent. I raised two teenage sons who were so turned off by what they knew about adult life in America that the only fantasy they could enjoy was building a cabin in the woods and escaping from the whole mess. They could not think of any work they might enjoy, any sort of education they might want to pursue. To them, a disciplined life of regular work and a regular house and a regular car and a regular family seemed like a death sentence. If that is how you feel about the rewards our society offers, why would you throw yourself into school? 

In my sons' telling, high school was all about adults trying to terrify teenagers into studying by telling them that only good students who go to good colleges ever get to have good adult lives. Their response to this was to say, I don't want that kind of life, so to hell with all of it.

So I wonder if maybe "boys are failing in school" is a small piece of a much bigger problem, that we live in a world that many people find depressing in its very nature

Mont Saint Michel

Mont Saint Michel is one of the most photographed places in the world, a stunning combination architecture and setting. 

I have chosen to write about the place even though all of you surely know it because I have a lifelong fascination with towns that consist of a single steep hill covered with buildings. I began trying to draw such towns when I was no more than seven and I doodled them during boring college lectures. I believe my obsession started with this picture, the cover art to Return to the Happy Islands by James Kruss; the Happy Islands Behind the Winds books were great favorites of mine when I was just learning to read.

This small island half a mile off the Normandy coast is just the sort of place early medieval monks sought out, and there may have been a monastic community here by the sixth century. At that time it was known an Mount Tombe. It soon became a place of pilgrimage. 

It was renamed Mons Sancti Michaelis in periculo maris – Mount Saint Michael at the peril of the sea – in 708. In that year an oratory was erected to Saint Michael by bishop Saint Aubert of Avranches. Monastic lore tells us that Saint Michael visited Aubert in his sleep and ordered him to do this. When nothing was done after the first two visitation, the archangel returned a third time and gave new emphasis to the order by pressing his thumb into the bishop's skull. What is supposed to be the bishop's skull is displayed at the Saint-Gervais d'Avranches basilica with a thumb-sized scar on it; nineteenth-century sculptor Jean-Baptiste Barré's vision of this miracle is shown above.

The monastery attracted patronage from important nobles, including the Viking Rollo after he converted to Christianity and settled down as Duke of Normandy. William I, who was duke from 927 to 942, gave lavishly to the monastery and had it converted to the Benedictine Rule. The story goes that most of the monks left rather than accept that decision. Benedictine writers said that was because the monks were dissolute and corrupt, but it might have been because they were Bretons who followed a Celtic rule they did not wish to exchange for a system imported from Rome.

Building of the great abbey began in the early 1000s. The architect was William of Volpiano, an Italian who had already designed other churches for the Norman dukes.

This was a Romanesque and in fact quite Roman-looking building.

William made the daring choice to place the huge church on the very top of the hill, even though the crest was not big enough for it. You can see in this profile that the outer walls of the church are supported by other buildings below them, which were constructed with massive arches to bear the weight.

I can't find out anything about this sculpture of Saint Michael weighing souls, but it looks Romanesque.

That big new 11th-century church appeared in the Bayeux Tapestry.

The abbey includes many other medieval structures besides the church. This is the refectory.

The scriptorium.

The complex geometry of the hilltop generates lots of spaces like this.

In 1204 the abbey was besieged and the church was damaged. The French king and other nobles donated generously for the reconstruction, which led to the apse being rebuilt in a gothic style.

Mont Saint Michel and 16th and 17th centuries

For a long time there was nothing on the island but the monastery, but during the Hundred Years War the island was first fortified and then used as a prison. In 1433 the English attacked it, but such is the strength of the place that a small French garrison easily held them off. Fortifications require people to defend them, and people require places to live and so on, so a small town gradually grew up on the slopes between the monastery and the walls.

Views of the town.

To lift supplies up to the abbey the monks had a treadmill crane, which still survives.

By the time of the French Revolution the abbey was nearly empty, so the government took it over and used it as a prison for its clerical opponents.

In the nineteenth century it became what it is today, a place for tourists to be awed by the glories of the past.

Extraordinary Bronze Age Sword from Germany

Just uncovered in Nordlingen, Germany, "so well preserved that it gleamed." Dates to the Middle Bronze Age, around 1300 BC. It was found in a grave containing three people, a man, a woman, and a child. With that kind of preservation I imagine the DNA will soon tell us if they were related.

The Hiddensee Treasure

In 1872 the small Baltic island of Hiddensee was struck by destructive floods. Sometime around then, a wonderful hoard of gold objects from the Viking Age ended up in the museum at Rügen, a larger Baltic island now in Germany.

As to how they ended up there, most internet sources have little to say. The only exception I found is this numismatic site, which is so paranoid that even an attempt to screen cap their text generates a message about potential legal action. Anyway the paranoid coin collectors tell us that Baltic fishermen began offering extraordinary gold objects for sale around Rügen, including in the open marketplace. A local teacher and amateur archaeologist named Rudolf Baier realized their scholarly importance and bought all he could find for the sum of RM 2,257. Baier bought them by weight, paying ten times the going rate for plain 14 karat gold.

Baier eventually put them on display in the Stralsund Museum. That 2,257 marks was a lot of money, but not even the paranoid coin collectors have any speculations about how a schoolteacher raised a sum that was surely more than his annual salary. According to various sites, the purchases were made in 1873 and 1874, so likely at several separate times from multiple sellers, which raises the possibility that some objects from the hoard have disappeared.

Modern art historians think these finds date to the 10th century. The Danish National Museum, which included these in an exhibit a few years ago, tells us:

The processing of such a quantity of gold in the hollow jewelery bodies, with this precision of the granulation technique, in interaction with the braided ribbon and pearl wire ornamentation and with the bird of prey head on the hanging loops, can only have taken place in the environment of a princely centre. It is believed that the jewelry is related to the Danish Viking king Harald Bluetooth. After his baptism at the Ottonian court around 965 AD, Bluetooth led Christianity in Denmark. 

Which brings me to another point, because the identity of these objects is much disputed online. The Danish National Museum thinks this is an explicitly Christian hoard, but all the online sellers of Viking art call these Thor's hammers. I suppose that is just the pagan preferences of contemporary Viking fans, but I'm having trouble turning these into Christian symbols myself.

Anyway this is a remarkable find, and another insight into the vast amount of gold treasure that washed through the Viking world as they looted, conquered, and traded their way across Europe.

Links 16 June 2023

Face of an Etruscan bronze warriot figurine, c 500 BC

Morgan Housel with a capsule history of the US economy from 1945 to 2020; says all the radical movements of recent years, from Occupy Wall Street to the Trump campaign, have been a protest against how the economy changed between 1980 and 2016.

Radio Free Asia reports that Kim Jong Un has responded to an increase in suicides by banning suicide.

In response to wargames showing enormous losses in a war with China, the Pentagon wants to massively ramp up US arms production. This new "era of war" is going to impose huge costs on all of us.

Today's mind-stretching exercise: very interesting, somewhat technical description of how ChatGPT and other Large Language Models work.

"Egypt bans Dutch archaeologists over exhibition linking Beyonce and Rihanna to Queen Nefertiti." In the rest of the world it may be commonplace to see ancient Egyptians as black or African, but the Egyptian government is not having any of that.

Famouse Edward Tufte essay, The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: "Many true statements are too long to fit on a PP slide, but this does not mean we should abbreviate the truth to make the words fit. It means we should find a better way to make presentations."

On the small island of Kythnos, Greek archaeologists report "countless" ex votos from a shrine Demeter used from the 7th century BC to the 4th century AD.

The devastation caused by Burmese pythons in the Everglades.

This Canadian fire season has been historically bad and looks set to continue being awful.

Tigers in Chinese art, from the British Museum.

Ukrainian officials are already talking about rebuilding the Kakhovka dam, but enormous dams are now out of favor with both environmentalists and economists; maybe it could be replaced with a series of smaller structures? This article doesn't mention it, but the EU and other international agencies that could help fund Ukraine's reconstruction may balk at a huge dam.

Exploring China's flooded cities.

Study of siblings who did and did not go to college finds that attending college has no impact on political orientation.

CalTech scientist successfully beam power from a satellite with solar panels down to earth. The technology is very cool but does anybody know what would happen if we were beaming terawatts of power through the atmosphere all day for decades?

Chatbots aren't reliable enough for doctors to use them in diagnosis, but they are already better than doctors at expressing empathy for patients. (NY Times; Kevin Drum has an ungated summary)

The prayer book shown by Thomas Cromwell's elbow in the famous Holbein portrait has been identified as a Book of Hours that belongs to Trinity College, Cambridge.

The EU is moving faster than the US toward regulating AI; the draft bill in the EU Parliament focuses on performing risk assessments for any new AI systems in "critical areas." Also restricts the use of facial recognition software. (NY Times)

Creepy monochromatic but otherwise lifelike polyester sculptures by Hans Op de Beeck.

The rough life of an urban mountain lion.

The water being shot into space from the underwater ocean at Enceladus contains lots of Phosphorus. Which is cool, but despite the hype it doesn't have much to do with finding life there; the elements central to earth life are all common in the universe, but life doesn't seem to be. Show me some complex organic molecules.

News outlets are reporting that the Campi Flegrei supervolcano, which includes all the volcanic features around Naples, may be close to erupting. But this video argues that the eruption is likely decades away. Still, a new eruption is inevitable in the future, which makes it bizarre to look at overhead photographs showing dense urban neighborhoods wedged between old calderas and cinder cones.

Kenyan tea pickers are destroying mechanical harvesting machines. In this case the plantations belong to international companies and the machines are made abroad, so hand picking may actually be better for Kenyans.

Kevin Drum on the complicated question of whether Oak Flat, Arizona is "sacred" to the Apache. The problem is that the dichotomy of sacred vs non-sacred is not really how many people think about the world; consider how nationalists refer to the "sacred soil" of their countries.

American conservatives find common ground with Muslims in protesting against LGTB books in the public schools. A friend of mine who spent time in rural Turkey told me 15 years ago that she didn't understand why conservative rural Americans hated Muslims, since they seemed exactly the same to her.

New claim of quantum computer progress from IBM (NY Times, ungated press release). Interesting approach, using randomization to smooth out the quantum errors, but it still seems to me like another problem specifically designed to be solvable by a quantum computer.

Politics in our time: "54% say govt doing a bad job but only 26% think the mainstream opposition would do better." From Germany, but could be from anywhere. The math would work out something like 40% for the government, 26% for the mainstream opposition, 18% for the radical right, 6% for the radical left, 10% no clue. Not a formula for stability.

Ukraine Links

Part 4 of that long interview with Prigozhin: "If I was in charge of the Ukrainian armed forces, we'd would be on the outskirts of Moscow. They're just being coy."

Falling water in the Kakhovka reservoir exposes human bones that some people say are German soldiers from WW II.

Crazy video of Ukrainian drones knocking out all three trucks in a Russian column. Related: Ukraine announces plan to train 10,000 more drone operators.

Breaking Defense: "With Ukraine losing up to 10,000 drones a month, mostly to Russian electronic warfare, it’s tempting to invest in anti-EW protection – but, experts agreed, it’s probably more cost-effective to accept high losses and just buy more bare-bones drones." 

Putin just held a meeting with all the prominent Russian milbloggers. As Rob Lee says, this suggests that he values them as an alternative source of information to what he receives from his own MOD.

Detailed, zoomable map of Russian field fortifications in Ukraine.

Global culture watch: "A European [Ukrainian] unit with a samurai patch puts a bluegrass cover of a mid-2000's rap song onto the live drone footage of artillery strikes. From SPGs that are likely covered in hentai stickers."

Short video showing two Russian self-propelled artillery pieces destroyed by GMLRS rocket strikes; the detonation of these missiles sprays their targets with high velocity tungsten balls, creating the distinctive pattern you see.

Jack Watling of RUSI summarizes the Ukrainian offensive as of June 14.

Kyiv Independent on the first week of the southern offensive.

Ukraine is already asking for and receiving more Patriot missiles, so they must be firing them at a good rate.

Russia is recruiting a volunteer battalion from Roscosmos, their space agency. Another sign of how they are wrecking their whole country to fight this war.

Russia's use of helicopters to blunt Ukraine's offensive and what sort of air defense might be needed to fight them.

State Surveillance and Ransomware

Section 702 is a controversial part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, passed with a bundle of other amendments in 2008. It allows the government to force telecoms and internet companies to grant access to the information they have on their customers, without a warrant. The FBI uses it millions of times a year, sometimes for dubious purposes:

In March, the leader of the House Intelligence Committee’s working group devoted to 702 renewal revealed he had been the target of wrongful searches. Last month, the administration declassified two court opinions that showed the bureau had used the spy tool to search for information about individuals who participated in the 2020 George Floyd protests.

But with Section 702 up for renewal this year, the Biden administration is releasing information on how the government has used Section 702 in the past:

The U.S. government used controversial digital surveillance powers to identify the individual behind the crippling ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline in 2021 and to claw back a majority of the millions of dollars in bitcoin the company paid to restore its systems, according to senior Biden administration officials. . . . In another instance, the government used information gleaned under those powers — known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — to identify and mitigate an Iranian ransomware attack against a nonprofit organization's systems in 2022.

So, yeah, the powers you can use to defeat ransomware hackers can also be used to harass protesters.

In general I am more afraid of Nazis and ransomware gangs than the FBI, and I would like for the government to put them behind bars. If only we could trust them.

Simon Saris Asks What We Should Do with Children

In "The Most Precious Resource is Agency", 2021, Simon Saris notes that Leonardo was working in Verrocchio's studio at 14, Andrew Carnegie in a telegraph office at 13.

Do children today have useful childhoods?

For a 13 year old today, what is the equivalent of being a telegraph office boy, where he can learn technology while contributing? What about for a 16 year old? 21 year old? What is today’s equivalent to being a studio apprentice of Verrocchio?

Where are the studios, anyway?

The world until recently was overflowing with onramps of opportunity, even for children, and we seem to do poorly at producing new ones. Thirteen-year-old Steve Jobs called Bill Hewlett and received a summer job at HP, which would be unsurprising in Carnegie’s time, was certainly surprising for 1968, and is obviously verboten today.

I suppose this fits in with the Peter Thiel-led attack on schooling. But it does make me wonder. My readers know I spend a lot of time wondering why the mental health of young Americans is so bad. Could part of the problem be that many young people spend too much time in school, and would be better off working, or doing some kind of directly job-related skills training? Saris thinks so:

Instead of an adolescence full of rites of passage, where one attempts to master something and accept responsibility, we have made it full of waiting, and doing work—for school is work—that nearly everyone knows is fake. . . . Who could blame young adults for thinking that work is fake and meaningless if we prescribe fake and meaningless work for the first two decades of their existence? By confining meaningful work to an adult-only activity, it is little wonder that adolescence is a period of great depression. It would be surprising if it was not.

But against all attacks on school we have to set the massive data showing that schooling transforms lives and communities everywhere in the world it is introduced.

But then again, that doesn't mean everyone should go to college or take lots of academic subjects in high school.

Anyway I am intrigued by the notion that the problems of young people might have something to do with our insisting that they stay in school so long and our refusal to let them take on work that feels meaningful to them.

Beast Men and Beasts

Copper alloy plate from Italy or Catalonia, c 1500 AD