Links 20 October 2023

Ogata Gekko, Dragon Rising to the Heavens, 1897

Kevin Drum finds a study saying the decline in young adult mental health is caused by a decline in the unsupervised play of children and wants to believe it, but sadly there is no real evidence.

Bursting bonsai sculptures by Patrick Bergsma, quite clever.

What to do with decommissioned coal-fired power plants? Well, some of them are in valuable waterfront locations where it is financially feasible to clean up the toxic mess and redevelop the sites: NY Times article, and web sites (first, second, third) for three very different ongoing redevelopment projects. Many others, however, are just getting closed up to moulder.

Strange physics: monopoles and vortex rings. Or you could try this attempt at an explanation for non-physicists, but I didn't find that it explained anything at all.

Fascinating map on X showing that in the recent Polish elections, Law and Justice won most of the area that was part of Russia before WW I, while the opposition won the areas that were then part of Prussia and Austria. (Warsaw is the big exception.)

Long post by Zvi on fertility decline. One way you know it has nothing to do with money is that women who win the lottery do not have more children.

Fascinating Bronze Age jewelry found in Swiss field.

For the curious, an article explaining what is in Cornelius Agirppa's De Occulta Philosophia (1533).

The sad story of Delonte West, former NBA player who once earned $6 million a year but went crazy, got addicted, and ended up panhandling on the street. His friends tried to help him – Mark Cuban, billionaire owner of one of his former teams, paid to send him to an expensive rehab center run by another former NBA player – but nothing has helped and now none of his old friends knows where he is. The next time somebody tells you it would be easy to fix our homelessness problem with a little more money, remember West, who has had access to resources far beyond what any government could possibly provide to all the sufferers.

Ukraine Links

Detailed thread on one set of Russian fortifications near Robotyne.

Detailed post from RUSI laying out the evidence that North Korea is now supplying Russia with massive quantities of munitions, likely in exchange for help with missile and other high-tech weapons systems with which North Korea can make even more trouble.

German blogger Tendar says Russia's offensive at Avdiivka is a catastrophic waste of resources undertaken for reasons of Russian politics, nothing to do with military strategy.

Short video of a Ukrainian robot laying mines on roads near Russian positions.

On October 19, Russia renewed the attack on Avdiivka, with more losses. (video, video with map) Pondering this offensive I feel lilke it must have been ordered by someone staring a map many miles from the front, because on a map Avdiivka looks vulnerable to encirclement. But the soldiers at the front know it has been intensely fortified since 2014, with miles of tunnels and deep underground bunkers, the artillery having preset firing solutions for every possible approach, etc.

Reliable Ukrainian bloggers say the Russian losses at Avdiivka on October 19 were their worst of the war. Ukrainian MOD says the Russians lost more than 50 tanks and 100 other armored vehicles and more than 1,000 men, likely an exaggeration, but still. People are making comparisons to Germany's Ardennes offensive in December 1944 (the Bulge, to Americans) in that Russia is throwing its available resources into a futile attack rather than saving them for defense. More video here.

Commenting on the Avdiivka assaults, Russian journalist Sladkov says these attacks are pointless until Russia can secure air supremacy and use it to wreck Ukrainian artillery; without that, attacks are just throwing men away. Since as Sladkov knows Russia cannot get air supremacy, this is like saying all attacks are pointless. Best line by a Russian commentator: "if you can't break through a wall with your head, use it to think instead."

The count of Russian officers killed in Ukraine, confirmed by funeral notices and the like, has reached 3,000.

Ukrainian reconnaissance units crossed the Dnipro east of Kherson and appear to have taken control of two villages and destroyed Russian trucks on an important road. Summary here from the ISW; X posts here and here.

In their first use of ATACMS missiles on October 17, Ukraine attacked two Russian helicopter bases; battle damage assessment by OSINT guys suggests that 9 helos were destroyed and 11 badly damaged, by far the biggest one day loss of Russian aircraft since WW II.

Andrew Perpetua runs down the dozens of Russian bomb, missile, and artillery attacks on Urkainian civilians in a single day. Somebody on X recently, apropos of the claimed Israeli attack on a hospital in Gaza (which probably didn't happen), said "Imagine how loud people would be screaming if Russia attacked a hospital in Ukraine." But Ukraine has already reported to UN war crimes investigators *707* Russian attacks on Ukrainian hospitals, including one on a maternity hospital in which 40 people were killed. The degree to which people who are not paying attention imagine they know what is going on somtimes simply baffles me.

Fall Garden

Choosing a Speaker

We should just have a lottery. If you lose you have to be Speaker.

–Representative Mike Collins (R-Georgia)

Buck 8917 and the Mysteries of Animal Death

In the New York Times, a piece on the ongoing Deer-Forest Study, a collaboration of Penn State Universitty, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Pennsylvania Game Commission, and the Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry. These researchers intensely study 100 square miles of central Pennsylvania where deer roam across a series of steep, forested ridges. As part of the study they have put GPS collars on about 1,200 deer, studying things like the size of their home ranges, how their lives change with the seasons, how they react to hunting, and so on. Their main scientific interests are actually more focused on the forest than the deer, trying to figure out how large deer herds impact the environment. But sometimes they stumble on little mysteries of animal life:

Researchers from Penn State had captured and put a GPS collar on the adult male that spring in Bald Eagle State Forest, about 15 miles northeast of State College, Pa. Put a tracker on most deer and you’ll find they stick pretty close to their home range, which was true for 8917. He sauntered, stopped to forage or bedded down for a nap mostly within an undulating square mile of forest full of towering hemlock and tangled rhododendron. But on that June day, he made a one-mile beeline, hiking to the top of a rocky ridgeline, where he seemed to while away the afternoon before walking directly home.

Then, in 2015, after two mating seasons, two hunting seasons and thousands of laps around his home range, Buck 8917 died — unsurprising given he was about 4 years old. It was where he died that surprised the researchers: that same ridge he’d visited just once in the two years he’d been collared.

The blog post on which this is based is here.

Wily Pogany, Illustrations to Wagner's "Parsifal"

The opera Parsifal, loosely based on a medieval epic poem, was the work that enraged Nietzsche so much he denounced Richard Wagner as a fraud and cut off all ties with him. 

It tells the story of the knights who guard the Holy Grail, who are in bad shape when the story begins. Their king is dying and their castle is besieged by an evil sorceror whose main mode of attack is to send a crew of beautiful, wicked women to seduce the knights away from the virture necessary to their callling. As their virtue falters, their king's illness worsens and everything is dire.

A mysterious boy then appears who, it turns out, was raised alone in the forest by his mother – that is, away from the corruption of human society. This is Parsifal. 

His virtue is such that he waves off all attempts at seduction, waves off another attempt by the leader of the wicked women to get his pity by whining about the curse they are under, then somehow acquires the Holy Lance that pierced Christ's side and uses it to banish the sorceror and heal the dying Grail King. Angels sing Halleluja.

Yeah, Nietzsche was right about the plot.

But some people love the music, and Wily Pogany still did wonderful things in his illustrations, drawn in 1912.

More Pogany here.

How about an MA in Magical Studies?

NY Times:

In the ancient city of Exeter, three women were hanged for practicing witchcraft in the late 17th century, the last of such executions in England. Now, merely a short walk from where the hangings occurred, the University of Exeter will offer a postgraduate degree in magic and occult science, which the school says is the first of its kind at a British university.

Prof. Emily Selove, the head of the new program and an associate professor in medieval Arabic literature, said the idea for the degree, which will be offered starting in September 2024, came out of the recent surge in interest in the history of witchcraft and a desire to create a space where research on magic could be studied across academic fields.

Coursework will include the study of Western dragons in lore, literature and art; archaeology theory; the depiction of women in the Middle Ages; the practice of deception and illusion; and the philosophy of psychedelics. Through the lenses of Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, lecturers will explore how magic has influenced society and science.

People are enrolling, says one British wiccan,

Not because they’re idiots and think it’s going to teach them how to wave a magic wand and do a spell. They’re people who have just a huge curiosity about the world and the way we perceive the seen and the unseen worlds.

But, I mean, if they're not going to teach us how to do it, what's the point? Seriously, I foresee a program not rigorous enough to satisfy grim academics like me and not woo enough to satisfy most of the people who might enroll. 

Let's consider, for example, "Western dragons in lore, literature and art," a subject once dear to my young heart. Dragons are not common in the western tradition until the late 19th century, and so far as I can tell they do not mean anything in particular. As I wrote here about the Roman magical tradition, what stands out to me most about the western lore of magic is its complete absence of any kind of theoretical framework beyond a vague notion of spiritual powers and a desire that emotions (hate, envy, desire) have a real impact on things that are. Dragons sometimes represent ill-gotten wealth – in some German witch trials, witnesses said they knew the accused had sold their souls for gain because they were seen riding in the air on dragons – but mainly they are just scary monsters for heroes to slay and be slain by and things for 14th-century manuscript illustrators to doodle in the margins.

The sad truth is that what comes down to us from the western lore of magic is, for the most part, neither particularly deep nor particularly interesting. There are a couple of fine fairy tales – East of the Sun and West of the Moon, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, The Yew Tree – but those were not recorded until the nineteenth century and so far as we can tell the people who told them did not understand the memories of ancient shamanism they encode. Yes, there are few hints that some medieval people had a practice based on ancient religious lore, but three-quarters of them are in one book, Carlo Ginzburg's The Night Battles. Otherwise the best books about witchcraft focus, not on the magical acts, but on the petty village rivalries and obscure hatreds acted out in the trials. 

To extract any kind of religion or philosophy from our magical lore requires a great act of imagination, spinning those hints into something which is not really there but which you can glimpse if you read by moonlight in the Ember Days. I think I understand something about Druidism, but I freely admit that the leap from the meager sources to the thinking behind them is half imaginative. And that is why I loaded what I know about our magical tradition into a novel (The Raven and the Crown) rather than a monograph. To me, the magical sources work best as springboards for the imagination of storytellers, whether that is Irish talesmen or J.R.R Tolkien. And that is why modern Wicca is only very loosely based on any kind of tradition, filled out with modern ecological sensibilities, feminism, and the Romantic cult of feeling. 

You could fill a course with facts about our old lore, I guess, but I think I could lay out everything I know about what they might mean in an hour. How one might turn that into an MA program I have no idea.

The Piccirilli Brothers Carved America in Stone

Until just a few minutes ago I had never heard of the Piccirilli Brothers, and did not know how many of America's most famous stone sculptures came from their studio. I discovered them thanks to a wonderful feature in the Times by John Freedman Gill (Lincoln Memorial, Washington)

The story begins in 1888, when Giuseppe Piccirilli (1844–1910), a stone carver from Massa, brought his family from Italy to New York City. The Piccirillis, it is said, had been stone carvers since the 1500s, and since that was the main business in Massa it is certainly plausible. In New York Piccirilli and his six sons – Ferruccio, Attilio, Furio, Masaniello, Orazio, and Getulio – set up in business as carvers. Their main business was carving works designed in clay or plaster by other sculptors, notably David French, but they also designed and carved many architectural details and two of the brothers were noted sculptors in their own right. (Above, pediment of the New York Stock Exchange)

The brothers.

Washington as Commander in Chief, from the arch in Washington Square.

Allegorical figure of America outside the Customs House.

Three of the hundreds of figures they executed for Riverside Church.

Pediment on the US House of Representatives.

One of the famous lions outside the New York Public Library.

A detail from one of the very strange allegorical sculptures outside the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg, which puzzled me to no end when I saw them. What, I wondered, is that supposed to be? But that was before smart phones so I left without ever finding out and never got around to looking them up. I now learn that  this thing is titled Love and Labor: The Unbroken Law, while the other is The Burden of Life: the Broken Law. But I suppose the blame for this fiasco rests, not with the Piccirilli brothers, but with the designer, George Grey Barnard.

The Piccirilli studio.

Statue of railroad tycoon Samuel Spencer in Atlanta.

The Outcast, original work by Attilio Piccirilli, said to be a response to anti-Italian prejudice

Figures from the USS Maine Monument.

I love these, but it makes me sad to think that the Piccirilli Brothers studio closed in 1950 and public sculpture has been mostly a grim wasteland ever since.

A Plea for Peace

Israeli reservist Nir Avishai Cohen took time on his way to the front to write, I'm going to war for Israel. Palestinians are not my enemy.

This war, like others before it, will end sooner or later. I am not sure I will come back from it alive, but I do know that a minute after the war is over, both Israelis and Palestinians will have to reckon with the leaders who led them to this moment. We must wake up and not let the extremists rule. Palestinians and Israelis must denounce the extremists who are driven by religious fanaticism. The Israelis will have to oust National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and their far-right circle from power, and the Palestinians will have to oust the leadership of Hamas.

I try to look for shreds of hope. The Yom Kippur War, the most difficult war that Israel had known until this week, started by surprise in 1973. After a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt was finally signed in 1979, the border with Egypt — one that was once the site of the dead and wounded — became a border of peace.

Israelis must realize that there is no greater security asset than peace. The strongest army cannot protect the country the way peace does. This current war proves it once again. Israel has followed the path of war for too long.

At the end, after all of the dead Israelis and Palestinians are buried, after we have finished washing away the rivers of blood, the people who share a home in this land will have to understand that there is no other choice but to follow the path of peace. That is where true victory lies.

Links 13 October 2023

Raphael, 1504

Wonderful paintings in a newly discovered Roman tomb near Naples, including an amazing Cerberus.

AI in education: using oral exams to get around students cheating with AI, but then using AI to grade their results.

MIT scientists publish details of a system they say could make desalinated seawater cheaper than tap water.

Vox on corporate mindfulness. My former employers were into that for a while and of all the dumb and insulting fads my bosses have pushed over the years I thought workplace mindfulness was the dumbest and most insulting.

Study finds that domesticated animals are not stupider than their wild relatives.

Fifteen-foot-tall pilotable robots for sale. But are they robots or mech suits? My sons, veterans of innumerable such online debates, are firmly on the side of mech suits.

Evidence of numerous large objects orbiting the sun, out beyond the Kuiper Belt.

NY Times piece on scientific uncertainty, claims there is no real data saying that flossing is good for your teeth, or that sunscreen prevents skin cancer. As a regular sufferer of ear infections I once looked into data on antibiotic treatments, and found that there is next to none, which is why some doctors prescribe a high dose for three days and others a lower dose for ten days; one small study I did find said antibiotic treatment reduced the average duration of ear infection-induced misery by 12 hours, from 5 days to  4 1/2. 

Story at The New Yorker about academic data fraudsters Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino. We should bring back some old punishement for people like this, say, tarring and feathering, or riding them out of academia on a rail. I don't want to put them in jail, just humiliate them and make the point that faking data is a dangerous way to climb the ladder.

The US Army is updating its doctrine in response to lessons from Ukraine, starting with artillery but including changes in brigade headquarters and other matters.

Remarkable Roman shipwreck from the late 200s AD found in shallow water off Sicily. (article, 3-minute video)

Lots of angst in the press, especially the conservative press, about mass shoplifting, but Kevin Drum reports that shoplifting remains a minor nuisance for retailers and has gone up only a little. But that's nationwide, and it does seem that retailers have reacted by closing some stores in places where the problem is worst, like San Francisco.

This week's best headline: "National Emergency Alert Test Outs Amish Men as Smartphone Owners, Gets Them Shunned."

Vox piece on the legal issues surrounding homeless camps, which many states and cities want the Supreme Court to reconsider. (Can anybody explain to me why the useless word "encampment" is spreading at the expense of its exact synonym, "camp"?)

Using CRISPR to make chickens more resistant to bird flu. (NY Times, Science)

Interesting NY Times article about Native Americans and the solar eclipse, because in most native traditions an eclipse is a spiritually dangerous event that one must protect against with the proper rituals. Navajo are "strongly urged" to spend the eclipse in a hogan; one Amazon Indian says, "our rituals are like vaccines that protect us."

The prize for the first person to read a word inside one of the scrolls from Herculaneum that can't be unrolled has been awarded to a guy who found "porphyras" (purple), working from the 3D scan of a scroll made in 2019 using a particle accelerator.

Via Tyler Cowen, an econometric analysis of state-level marijuana legalization: "Post-legalization, average state income grew by 3 percent, house prices by 6 percent, and population by 2 percent. However, substance use disorders, chronic homelessness, and arrests increased by 17, 35, and 13 percent, respectively. Although some of our estimates are noisy, our findings suggest that the economic benefits of legalization are broadly distributed, while the social costs may be more concentrated among individuals who use marijuana heavily."

Pretty good article at Vox on Hammas and what they hope to achieve: basically, to keep Arab countries from normalizing relations with Israel, halt what they see as a slide toward accepting the status quo, put the Palestine/Israel conflict back in the center of Arab thinking, and remind Israel that they can have no peace or security until the Palestinians are satisfied. And Zack Beauchamp, more critical of Israel; and Tom Friedman at the NY Times, who is not anti-Israel but is very much anti-Netanyahu. Also at the Times, David Brooks finds himself meditating on the time in 1999 to 2000 when it seemed like a peace deal was within reach. 

An intelligent response to X accounts with trans flags cheering on Hamas. Understanding that Hamas is a pathology spawned by a long chain of atrocities and errors from many parties is not a reason to applaud horrific acts of terrorism by fundamentalist fanatics.

Ukraine Links

Ukrainian reserve officer Tatarigami says there is no sign that Russia is running out of troops, so claims that Russia is "out of reserves" and that therefore Ukraine might soon break through are false: "The enemy remains formidable and capable."

Tatarigami noted earlier this month that Russia is actively expanding their training grounds for infantry and tank crews. 

Delivering drones to Ukraine in lots of 5,000.

Data site that graphs equipment losses over time, with various permutations, based on Oryx data. The documented rate of Russian losses has been significantly slower in 2023 than in 2022.

Long doompost from Igor Girkin's wife, apparently based on a letter he sent from prison in September. He says Putin has decided not to order any major mobilization until after the presidential election next spring, which means Russia cannot make any progress. On the other hand Ukraine is being deliberately starved of weapons by NATO because they want to stretch out the war in the hope that it will eventually cause the collapse of Russia, which Girkin thinks is a real danger. So he foresees no dramatic changes over the next six months, only ongoing "positional battles" and attacks on infrastructure, each side hoping to wear the other down.

Tatarigami again on the new Russian offensive near Avdiivka, a major assault using at least a hundred armored vehicles. So far they have made limited progress with high losses, including at least 36 armored vehicles wrecked. Videos of this attack here, here, here, here. Summary from the Institute for the Study of War, which calls this a "major offensive." And from another Ukrainian source: "Certainly it is hell for the Ukrainians at Avdiivka but they have destroyed a very large amount of hardware. I am very curious to see how long the Russian offensive will last."

Oryx count of Russian losses for October 11, many from Avdiivka: 16 tanks, 26 armored vehicles, 3 towed artillery, 5 self-propelled artillery, 1 MLRS, 1 SAM, 10 others.

More on the End of Progress in Style and Art

At the NY Times, Jason Farago goes on at length about the end of the modernist project, the artistic command to "make it new."

To audiences in the 20th century, novelty seemed to be a cultural birthright. Susan Sontag could write in 1965, with breezy confidence, that new styles of art, cinema, music and dance “succeed one another so rapidly as to seem to give their audiences no breathing space to prepare.” Today culture remains capable of endless production, but it’s far less capable of change. . . . Have you tried to furnish an apartment lately? Whether you are at Restoration Hardware or on Alibaba, what you are probably buying are replicas of European antiques: “contemporary” designs first seen in Milan in the 1970s or Weimar in the 1920s. Harry Styles is rocking in the ’80s; Silk Sonic is jamming in the ’70s; somehow “Frasier” has been revived and they barely had to update the wardrobes. . . . 

We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press. There is new content, of course, so much content, and there are new themes; there are new methods of production and distribution, more diverse creators and more global audiences; there is more singing in hip-hop and more sampling on pop tracks; there are TV detectives with smartphones and lovers facing rising seas. Twenty-three years in, though, shockingly few works of art in any medium — some albums, a handful of novels and artworks and barely any plays or poems — have been created that are unassimilable to the cultural and critical standards that audiences accepted in 1999. To pay attention to culture in 2023 is to be belted into some glacially slow Ferris wheel, cycling through remakes and pastiches with nowhere to go but around. The suspicion gnaws at me (does it gnaw at you?) that we live in a time and place whose culture seems likely to be forgotten.

This is not at all a new sentiment; back in 2012 I wrote about an article that noted how paltry were the stylistic changes between 2012 and 1992 compared to those between 1992 and 1972, 1972 and 1952, 1952 and 1932, and so on. I mention this essay because Farago has an interesting theory about what is behind this: digital modes of distribution. 

The idea is that art and style changed rapidly through the modern period because there was a "hot" in group that established the trends, and people worked hard to keep up with those changing trends because that made you a hipster plugged into what was happening. If you didn't keep up, you were a hopeless square. So the rapid change happened because these avant garde circles had the power to drag everyone else along with them.

Much of the power of those in groups came because they were able to dominate the very limited channels of distribution: the radio, the key galleries, the big city symphonies, the very small world of cutting edge film. But the digital world has unlimited power of distribution, which nullifies the power of those channels and thus the power of the avant garde. Without needing to keep up with the ultra-cool trendsetters, they is no incentive for stylistic or artistic change.

It fascinates me that as far as music goes, there is essentially no generation gap between me and my children. The things they like that I don't span the decades from Nina Simone and Frank Sinatra to The Mountain Goats. Farago notes that the number one single of 2022 was actually released in 2020 but took more than a year to go viral on TikTok. That is because today's music, says Farago, consumer pays no attention to what is "hot" at the moment but cruises thorugh the decades as whim or taste requires. 

So, in this telling, rapid cultural change was created by the ability of a small, innovative avant garde to seize control of the key distribution nodes and force everyone to go along with them or be square, and the freedom the internet gives us to see or hear whatever we want, whenever we want, destroys their power and puts us back in a situation where changing a whole immense culture is very difficult.

Hidden Colors on the Parthenon Sculptures

Some remarkable results have just been published based on new studies of the Parthenon Sculptures, aka the Elgin Marbles. Up until now, attempts to find traces of paint on the sculptures have produced extremely meager results. But using a new technique called "visible-induced luminescence" it is possible to see traces of one particular pigment, Egyptian blue. Egyptian blue is calcium copper silicate (CaOCuO(SiO2)4),and I suppose it is the copper atoms and their bonds to oxygen that show up in the scan.

Besides the article, the investigators also put up a wonderful 22-minute video on YouTube that I recommend for the curious. The remarkable thing these investigators discovered was not just that the marbles were painted, which most people already believed, but something about how they were painted. Staring very hard at the patterns made by the presence or absence of Egyptian blue, they found all sorts of stuff, like running legs and the hand and foot above.

They posit that the Parthenon figures were depicted wearing elaborately woven robes with floral patterns and in particular patterns of human figures, like the robe shown in this vase painting.

A pattern seen here on Hestia's robe suggests an elaborate border

As in this example.

I am, in general, very jaded about studies that apply high-tech methods to famous works of art, especially when the findings are presented in video. The narrator goes on about great revelations and overturning old ideas, but usually the actual discoveries are blah. That's what I thought when I first read about this study, ho hum, the Parthenon marbles were painted, I already believed that. But the discoveries presented in this study are of another order entirely, and imagining those scuptures with elaborate robes showing human figures and palmette borders very much changes how I see them.

Elsie Stone Holiday

Elsie Stone Holiday is a Diné basket weaver who married into the Douglas Mesa family of weavers and sells mainly through the Two Rocks Trading Post in Utah. Above is the basket that blew me away, Eclipse.

Fadeaway

Blue Butterflies and Starburst

Four Seasons, which seems to have won a blue ribbon.

Turtle

The Best American Schools for Working Class Children are Run by the Military

The US military's school system has long been a high performer among US school systems, but according to data published by the NY Times, pandemic declines in the test scores at all of the high performing state systems have left the military's schools the best in the country. This is despite having some unusual problems, such as students who move from school to school more frequently than those in any state and parents who are often away from home for long periods.

Their schools had the highest outcomes in the country for Black and Hispanic students, whose eighth-grade reading scores outpaced national averages for white students.

Eighth graders whose parents only graduated from high school — suggesting lower family incomes, on average — performed as well in reading as students nationally whose parents were college graduates.

Etc.; lots more numbers at the Times.

How do they do it? The Times offers these suggestions:

1. The schools are well-funded. The costs are hard to compare, because the military spends a lot supporting schools in places like Okinawa and Germany, but it looks like military funding is on par with the top spending districts in big cities and rich suburbs. I know two teachers who switched from DC suburban schools to military schools because the pay was better, and the difference is even bigger in the rural areas where many military schools are located. A place like Fort Moore in Alabama has their pick of local teachers.
2. All of the parents are employed. Not that military families don't have their share of dysfunction, including a high divorce rate, but by definition at least one of the parents has a career. 
3. Everyone has a home and medical care.
4. Mixing of social classes; in military schools the children of privates sit side-by-side with the children of major generals.
5. Mixing of races with less racism than in the rest of America.

I would add another factor that I think is important:

1. A bedrock belief that with the right kind of disciplined environment even very troubled young people can achieve stability and success.

Liberals often find it baffling or irritating when conservatives hold up the military as the model for solving our social problems. But there are ways in which the military does better than the rest of the country in dealing with issues, especially poverty and racism. But, and this is a big qualifier, the military brings a lot of very trouble young people in line by 1) offering tangible rewards in terms of pay, job security, and opprotunities for advancement, and 2) being able to throw out those who won't toe the line. Hard for a country to throw people out.

Norbert Schwontkowski

Norbert Schwontkowski (b. 1949) has a big following among people who like their art anxious and strange. He has has a career that makes for boring reading – born in Berlin, art school in Berlin, then professor of art in Hamburg – and he did not make much of a splash until he was in his mid 50s, around 2004. For the next decade he had shows all over Europe, and most of his work that you see online dates to the 2004 to 2015 period. Above, Trying to Understand the World, 1994.

The work that first drew me to Schwontkowski, Prehistory, 2006.

Alberta at the Black Sea, 2009. One critic wrote,

Schwontkowski’s landscapes are often described as in-between places, occupying the “gap between the mythical and the mundane” He renders these places in a milky light using pulverized pigments, linseen oil, metal oxide, binding colors and bone glue. Neither here, nor there, the solitary character enveloped in endless expanse, anchored by a lonely landmark. And often moving towards a light. Schwontkowski senses the potency in empty space. Foucault’s insistence upon emptiness as essential in contemporary times resonates: “It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s disappearance.”

Observatorium, 2009. Another critic:

Schwontkowski does not presume to know the contours of our anxiety: he just shows us his, refusing to elevate it, and supposes that ours is equivalent. 

Inner Garden, 2006

The Architecture School of Tomorrow, 2011

The End of the World, 2005