Patrick Radden Keefe, "Say Nothing"

Say Nothing is a remarkable book, fully deserving of its slot on the NY Times 100 best books of the century. It is both a general narrative of the Irish Troubles and a tale of one particular murder, the disappearance of Jean McConville in 1972. The story is mainly told from the IRA point of view with a focus on four people: Gerry Adams, Brendan Hughes, and sisters Marian and Dolours Price.

Many Irish people had never accepted the partition of the island, and there had been sporadic political violence in the north since 1916. But things were mostly pretty quiet in the 1950s and 1960s. What ignited the Troubles was an attempt by some young Catholics to organize a civil rights movement modeled on the one in the US. On October 5, 1968 a group of Catholic civil rights protesters tried to march through a Protestant neighborhood in Derry, and they were savagely attacked by loyalist paramilitaries while the police watched. This and other incidents led some members of the Irish Republican Army to call for a resumption of the "armed struggle" to drive out the British. Older IRA men were not eager for war, so a group of young radicals split away from the main faction and formed the Provisional IRA. It was the "Provos," as people called them, who carried out most of the bombings, shootings and so on over the next twenty years. Well, from the Catholic side, anyway; Protestant paramilitaries carried out plenty, and there were also atrocities committed by the police and the British army.

Two of the leaders of the Provos were Gerry Adams, who was more of a strategist, and Brendan Hughes, who was the operational leader of the Belfast Brigade. Marion and Dolours Price were two of their top soldiers. There is now a lot of oral history of these people, and they described these early days as dangerous and violent but also thrilling. Then they all went to prison. Marion and Dolours staged a famous hunger strike; one of the things I had forgotten about, until this book reminded me, was what a big deal IRA hunger strikes were. Gerry Adams seems to have done a lot of thinking during his prison stint, and to have decided – when is completely unclear – that violence would never drive out the British. So he shifted over from the IRA to become the head of its associated political party, Sinn Fein. His first major move was to have an imprisoned hunger striker, Bobby Sands, run for Parliament as a Sinn Fein candidate. (That was in 1981.) As Adams got more and more into politics and spent more time negotiating with various British, Irish, and American politicians, he began to say that he had never carried out violent acts and had in fact never been a member of the IRA.

One of the best parts of Say Nothing relates what happened to the aging soldiers of the IRA as the violence wound down and the peace process gathered momentum. They were a depressed, alcoholic, drug addicted bunch, and many of the former hunger strikers ended up anorexic. They were also furious with Gerry Adams, who had once ordered them to commit violent acts but now pretended he had never been involved. The old provos complained that they had carried out killings and bombings with one goal in mind: to drive the British out of Ireland. The mishmash compromise of the Good Friday Accords was not what they had in mind. Dolours Price said that this outcome could not justify any of what she had done, that the violence would only have been worth it if it had led to victory.

But there were plenty of other moral quandaries to go around. After peace was more or less established people began to talk and records began to slip out, and it turned out that some of the worst murderers in both the IRA and the loyalists were on the payroll of British intelligence. (One British agent said that two out of every five high-ranking IRA men were informers.) Some British newspapers were outraged; if the government knew about killings, shouldn't they be arresting the killers rather than paying them? In the US we had the same sort of confusion after 9-11; was the counter-terrorism operation more about military intelligence, or policing? Was it more important to prevent future attacks or to put people behind bars?

A book like this raises other questions. Keefe has done a lot of work to understand his IRA subjects, while limiting outrage over what they did. What should our attitude be? I find myself divided. The system in Northern Ireland was blatantly discriminatory, and the police worked in tandem with loyalist paramilitaries to keep Catholics down. The regime that resulted from the Good Friday Accords was much better for Catholics than what had come before. If the violence contributed to that end, it was in a sense beneficial.

But I don't think the violence did contribute very much. I think the main driver of peace in Ireland has been very broad social and economic changes. In 1968 Protestants in the north saw Catholic Ireland as a bunch of superstititious peasants barely out of the Middle Ages, and they wanted nothing to do with that priest-ridden state. To me, the biggest driver of peace has been the enormous economic and social change in Ireland, which has removed most of the issues that drove the conflict. Joining Ireland doesn't seem nearly as drastic or scary as it did in 1968. Meanwhile the economic situation in the north has deteriorated, and they are no longer significantly richer or better-educated than people in the rest of Ireland. As Keefe says, recent attempts by dissident IRA factions to restart the violence have been ignored by young people, who want nothing to do with violence that seems pointless to them.

That kind of progress warms my heart.

Creatures from the Pacific Depths

Filmed during remote exploration of a seamount off Chile. Above, Caspar octopus.

Golden coral and sea star.

Scorpionfish.

Bathyphysa conifera, aka the Flying Spaghetti Monster

First footage of a live Promachoteuthis squid. More here.

Links 6 September 2024

From NASA

Double portrait of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony Van Dyck stolen in 1979 is returned to Chatsworth House in England after it turned up in an auction.

Russian fortune tellers are doing a brisk business telling the relatives of missing soldiers that their loved ones are still alive.

Su Min, China's "road trip auntie," a retired woman who ditched her grouchy husband and hit the road, becoming a video star and an "icon for women all over the country." (NY Times, The Guardian, video at Sixth Tone)

The last of four dams on the Klamath River has been demolished, and the river flows unvexed to the sea.

The role of the white pine tree in the rising tensions that eventually led to the American Revolution. British attempts to reserve these trees for the use of their navy were not appreciated by settlers.

Someone has finally done a serious study of whether adding lithium to drinking water reduces suicide, and they found "a near perfect null result." They say the notion only seemed supported before because of publication bias, that is, only studies with positive findings got published.

Indian archaeologists claim that they have confirmed the existence of a shipyard at the Harappan site of Lothal on the Gujarati coast. But the study of Harappan (=Indus Valley) civilization has become such a nationalist football between India and Pakistan that I am now suspicious of all claims related to these sites. Compare wikipedia.

Marilynne Robinson, a novelist famous for curiosity and moral seriousness, has written a book about Genesis (the Biblical book) that this reviewer says is warmed-over dogmatism. Never inquire into the beliefs of writers you enjoy.

The cost of solar panels continues to fall, but the cost of installed solar power has stagnated, because costs related to land, labor, grid connections, and so on have increased. If you have solar panels installed on your house, the cost of the panels is only 10% of the total cost. Some futurists have talked about solar panels that cost no more than paper, but that may not lower electricity costs as much as you might think. From my own work I can tell you that US solar firms have plenty of money and want to build now but are having trouble finding sites, overcoming regulatory hurdles, and getting hooked up to the utility grid.

A Navajo woman weaves a replica of a Pentium chip.

A quiet Atlantic hurricane season will likely not stop news outlets from mindlessly repeating that storms are worse and more frequent these days because of climate change, a claim with no empirical basis.

This week in conspiracy theories: "Joe Biden and the CIA rigged the 2022 Brazilian election in favour of Lula in return for Brazil banning Elon Musk's X two years down the road to protect globalist control." That Joe Biden really plans ahead.

The old McMillan Sand Filtration Plant site in Washington, DC is finally being redeveloped after decades of opposition from fake historic preservationists. Matt Yglesias has commentary on Twitter/X. I really hate it when people pretend to care about history in order to fight development.

Panel discussion on liberal solutions to climate change: "I think that the push to address climate change both drives left-wing people towards very illiberal approaches—substantively and procedurally—and then global efforts to address climate change is fuel for a lot of right-wing populist backlash." And: "There’s this fear: Which am I afraid more of, climate change or climate change policy?"

Graves in Poland are thought to be Vandal warriors.

Detailed itinerary of Pocahontas' trip to London.

A new drug shows promise in treating the hot flashes and insomnia often caused by menopause.

Why you should read books by horrible people (like Alice Munro).

Against rereading.

Bat diseases and human mortality. (original paper, summary from Kevin Drum)

How did Ireland end up with a housing shortage just 15 years after a financial collapse caused by massive overbuilding of houses? This NY Times piece asks the question but doesn't really answer it. One part must be that the banks were crippled by the crisis, but I don't feel like I understand this at all.

NY City banned airbnb a few years ago partly because of concerns that it was taking apartments out of the rental market. But the ban has made NYC more expensive for visitors without doing anything to lower rents or increase the availability of apartments for residents. Of course you might argue that without the ban things would be even worse.

Russian paid millions to US right-wing influencers to spread Kremlin propaganda: NPR, AP, CBS. The indictment says the influencers may not have known where the money was coming from, but: "As far as being an anti-American piece of sh*t goes, Russia wanting to give you millions of dollars because they love your opinions is not better than selling your opinions for Russian money." And this: "The good news is there's someone out there with deep pockets willing to put real money into alternative media and actually pay their talent well. The bad news is that it's the Kremlin."

And see here on an alleged Russian plan to foment angry disputes between liberal and conservate US Jews.

Ukraine is doing great in the paraolympics because they have so many healthy young people missing limbs. So depressing it hurts.

Just when you thought the war couldn't get any worse: meet the flamethrower drone.

Retired US general and military writer Mark Hertling posted on Twitter/X that he was concerned to have read this sentence and hoped it wasn't true: "Distrust has become society's default emotion." The first response was from an adbot that posted, "Zero trust is more than a buzzword – it's essential."

Seeing the news that the Netherlands had upped their order for F-35 fighters to 58, I got curious as to how many of these have been sold. Exact numbers seem scarce, but at least 3,100 have been ordered and Lockheed Martin expects to sell 5,000 before they are through. They cost $80 to $100 million each. Right now production is about 150 per year, half for the US and half for other customers, so it will take quite a while to reach 5,000.  Anyway weapons manufacture is one part of the American economy that's going gangbusters.

Cancelling the Anglo-Saxons

There is a lot of angst among historians over the word "Anglo-Saxon." As in this screed from Canadian historian Mary Rambaran-Olm:

The scholarly field that investigates early England supposedly draws its name from the people studied, although the labels ‘Anglo-Saxonists’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon studies’ are fraught with inaccuracies. Today’s field represents more than just literature and linguistics, as archaeologists and historians (material, art, and otherwise) are all under one large umbrella. Historically, Anglo-Saxon studies itself has reinforced superiority of northern European or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ whiteness. Today we see the word misused extensively as a label for white identity despite it being inaccurate. . . . While some scholars outside the US argue that the term’s misuse is an American problem, it is also noteworthy that some British scholars—some of whom identified themselves as ‘English’ or more gallingly ‘Anglo-Saxon’ on academic listservs and across social media—and their institutions remain so intimately wedded to this inaccurate term. The contested term is not neutral. In fact, one cannot be neutral in the face of racism. Scholarly work, even historical studies, are never separate from current social and political realities.

To be fair, yes, "Anglo-Saxon" is a modern term that was rarely seen in early medieval Britain. (Three times, according to this essay.) But the same could be said for "Welsh" and "Irish." If I were teaching a course on this period I would title it "Early Medieval Britain," because only about 30 to 40 percent of the genes of modern British people come from the invaders sometimes called Anglo-Saxons, which means there were a lot of other people around. But some of the people opposed to "Anglo-Saxon," including Rambaran-Olm, prefer "English" or "England", which are equally rare before about 1000 AD and equally exclusive of many residents of the island.

And, to be fair in another way, "Anglo-Saxon" does have a long history of use in racist discourse. But do you know what other word has a long history of use in racist discourse? "White." The author of our screed feels that while the racist term "Anglo-Saxon" is so awful that it must be banned, she is obsessed with "whiteness" and injects it into every other sentence. How is "white" any better than Anglo-Saxon? This is one of my main beefs with woke anti-racism, that so many of its advocates are as obsessed with race as the KKK. 

But wait, there's more. As the term was used by racists, Anglo-Saxon never just meant "white," nor did it mean "northern European whiteness." It meant "white northern European Protestant." Among those it pointedly excluded were Irish and Jews. It seems weird for a British historian not to know that Anglo-Saxon rose to prominence, not as a term for discriminating white from black – "white" worked perfectly well for that – but as a way to cast undesirable whites out of the charmed circle. In her world, there are only "whites" and "people of color," and anybody who is white but wants to claim a legacy of oppression is a fraud.

I have lived long enough to marvel over all the things that people like Mary Rambaran-Olm seem to have forgotten. I have written here several times that nobody cares any more about the pioneers of second-wave feminism, the women who stormed the corporate world and fought for equal pay. These days they're just priveleged white people, or, if they make any noise, Karens. And how could any British historian not pause to remember that just fifty years ago Northern Ireland was torn apart by a near civil war between Protestants and Catholics, spawned in part by discrimination against Catholics harsher than anything "people of color" endure in England today? Plus, you know, the Holocaust.

Too many modern anti-racists are exclusively focused on the gap between "white people" and everyone else, as if that were the only axis of oppression in history. People who care about justice need to look up from their petty obsessions and extend their care to all of  humanity.

The Long Life of the Dragon Standard

Several pieces of surviving art depict Roman soldiers, especially cavalry, using dragon standards. This one is on Trajan's column. 

The Arch of Gallerius. The Latin word for these was draco.

As you can see, the standard consisted of a solid head mounted on a pole, from which trailed a cloth windsock. This is a gravestone from England, with a drawing showing what we think the stone looked like before the plow ran over it.

The solid part of one of these survives, found in a fort in Germany.

Here's a modern reconstruction.

The Greek historian Arrian tells us that these are "Scythian," which was by his time the Greek generic term for steppes peoples; modern historians think they were actually introduced to Rome by Sarmatian cavalry in Roman service.

I was moved to write about these when I discovered that they endured in Europe well into the Middle Ages. This is a Carolingian illustration of the 9th century.

King Harold's men in the Bayeux Tapestry.

And a fourteenth-century illustration showing King Arthur. Fascinating.

Threats to China's Security

China's State Security Ministry now has a social media account that they mainly use to warn citizens about potential security threats. Vivian Wang has some of the highlights (NY Times):

Apparent Good Samaritans: One recent post titled “Beware! Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing” warned readers that spies might pose as generous donors. . . .

Courier services: Another post was called “These types of packages are not allowed!” Besides reminding people not to mail top-secret documents to spies, it warned that “some foreign organizations and individuals” had shipped animals, such as alligator snapping turtles, American bullfrogs and red fire ants, to China to reproduce as invasive species and destroy local ecosystems.

Students looking for cash: College students are a persistent source of worry for Beijing. Another post warned that students looking for part-time work may be targets for spies who ask them to take photos of scientific research sites for pay.

Students applying to colleges abroad: But students don’t need to be sharing sensitive information to threaten national security. They may also be unwitting vessels for spreading a negative image of China — as described in another post, where a study-abroad agency purportedly inserted political content critical of China into a student’s application materials, to help them win admission overseas. “Without knowing it,” the post said, the student went from “a young student with a simple résumé to an anti-China vanguard.”

Almost anything might conceal a hidden listening device or camera: Pens, lighters, tissue boxes. Dragonflies might actually be tiny aerial drones. 

“Some unassuming daily objects may contain mysteries,” the post said, above a hotline for reporting spies.

Something I Agree with 100%: Pennies

Caity Weaver in the NY Times:

The penny may seem like a harmless coin. But few things symbolize our national dysfunction more than our inability to stop making this worthless currency. . . .

Most pennies produced by the U.S. Mint are given out as change but never spent; this creates an incessant demand for new pennies to replace them, so that cash transactions that necessitate pennies (i.e., any concluding with a sum whose final digit is 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 or 9) can be settled. Because these replacement pennies will themselves not be spent, they will need to be replaced with new pennies that will also not be spent, and so will have to be replaced with new pennies that will not be spent, which will have to be replaced by new pennies (that will not be spent, and so will have to be replaced). In other words, we keep minting pennies because no one uses the pennies we mint.

There are about 240 billion pennies in America, many of them sitting in jars. There are so many, and they weigh so much, that the government sometimes worries about what would happen if people suddenly decided to bring them to banks or otherwise use them. We couldn't cope with the resulting logistical nightmare. Incidentally that 240 billion is only a fraction of all the pennies ever minted; most have undergone a mysterious process the government calls "disappearance." The US penny is probably the most widely minted coin ever, and that portrait of Lincoln by far the most widely reproduced work of art.

US officials have been calling on the government to stop minting pennies for fifty years. Everyone with a brain knows this is stupid, but we can't stop.

I think, though, that Weaver is missing the real reason we don't do this. I don't think it is just inertia or lobbying by the company that makes the blanks. I think we don't do this because a minority of cranky Americans, the same ones who keep calling for us to go back to the gold standard, would cry bloody murder and call it a conspiracy to steal our money, probably hatched on Jekyll Island by the Jews who run the Federal Reserve, etc. And nobody in Congress cares enough to risk the wrath of those people.

David Reich Speculates

Fascinating podcast interview with paleogeneticist David Reich. The intereviewer asks Reich a lot of questions that elicit the answer, "I don't know" or "this isn't my area of expertise." But Reich must have been in an expansive mood, because after making his qualifiers he goes on to speculate, sometimes wildly, about what might be.

The most interesting theme concerns the role that comparatively small groups have played in human evolution. On the one hand, it seems that modern Eurasians and Native Americans are mostly descended from 1,000 to 10,000 people who left Africa around 55,000 to 60,000 years ago. These people, the model says, outcompeted not only the Neanderthals and the Denisovans but other groups of fully modern humans who had been in Eurasia for 50,000 years. On the other hand, 21st century humans have Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA, and DNA from other groups of modern humans, and, as Reich says about twenty times, the story of our past is always the story of movement and mixing. So what does it mean that we are "descended" from some group or other? Reich makes it clear that he does not understand this at all. The interviewer asks if we know where the group from which we mainly descend was at any point in time, and Reich basically answers no. Nobody knows how to model a past in which we always lived in small groups but somehow shared genes around the world.

He even says at one point that from one perspective you might say that nobody from outside Africa is really a fully modern human. Instead, he says, you could model our past as Neanderthals who are genetically overwhelmed by one wave of modern humans after another, gradually evolving to the point that they became 98% modern human without ever ceasing to be Neanderthals. In support of this view he mentions that while our genome is only 2% Neanderthal, if you go back 50,000 years ago our ancestors are 10-20% Neanderthal. It turned out, though, that Neanderthals had built up a lot of bad mutations over 500,000 years of living in small groups and those variants were quickly selected out.

Reich clearly feels that we do not understand human evolution.

Some other points:

Over the past 10,000 years, our genetic changes have been mostly related to disease resistance and metabolism. Lactose tolerance would be a great example of a metabolic change, but Reich uses another one: we have gotten less efficient at storing fat. This is presumably because farmers have diets that vary less over the course of the year. This was in response to a question about the argument that farming was a big mistake that has made life worse, and Reich basically says there is no evidence for increased dietary stress. In the course of this Reich mentions that there is very little evidence for any recent genetic changes related to cognition; people of 50,000 years ago seem to have had modern brains.

The relationship between culture and genetics is very complex. Reich describes cases in which cultures have been taken over genetically by people from outside, who can be detected only genetically, not because of any cultural or linguistic changes. One is the Polynesians. They came from Taiwan and were genetically East Asian. Then the Melanesian islands they settled were infiltrated by people from New Guinea, who took up Polynesian sailing and so on, leaving a massive genetic imprint on what remained a Polynesian culture.

The evidence seems to show that at the end of the Neolithic, around the time of the steppes invasion, plague was causing more than a quarter of all deaths in Europe. Reich says nobody will say this out loud because it seems so crazy, but it is what the data says.

In India, as in Europe, the population was changed by the steppes invaders who brought Indo-European languages and left a strong genetic signature. But whereas in Europe that percentage is about the same in every modern person, in India there are huge variations, based on caste, because the resistance to marriages between people of different castes has been strong enough to block most interbreeding for 2,000 years.

It is very weird that farming appeared all over the world within about 4,000 years of the end of the last Ice Age, and nobody can explain this. One theory is that the current interglacial era is a uniquely beneficial environment, which to me implies that we are riding a climate lucky streak that can't last too much longer.

There is no chance that there were Sumer-level civilizations before the end of the last Ice Age.

But the weirdest thing concerned attempts to study past epigenetics. Genomes are in practice always being modified by other molecules that shut down some genes and pump up others. Reich says there is some evidence of epigenetics from very old genomes, and the biggest difference anyone has noted is that in us, the genes for language are much more active. It seems that DNA evolution has not been fast enough to give us the language skills we need for our lives, so our bodies have resorted to other tricks 

Links 30 August 2024

Pia Lehti, In the Shelter of the Mother Tree

Tweet explaining that there are three kinds of prisons in Russia. There are red prisons, controlled by the state, and black prisons, controlled by mobsters. Both of these types go back to Soviet times. Now there are also green prisons, controlled by Islamists.

The Linothorax Project, an attempt to recreate classical linen armor.

Greg Palast, "I was on the phone with RFK Jr. when he lost his mind."

Total fertility in Ireland has fallen to 1.5, lower than Britain's for the first time since the beginning of modern statistics. The transformation of Ireland over the past 30 years has been stunning.

Seeking the origin of The Game of 58 Holes, as we call a board game attested across the Bronze Age Middle East. The Egyptian version is sometimes called "hounds and jackals."

Poster, based on interviews with people in QAnon, about how they "fell down the rabbit hole." The main conclusion seems to be "personal trauma + distrust in authority = conspiracism."

Why did Telegram founder Pavel Durov fly to France just in time to be arrested? Lots of chatter that he arranged this with the French police for dark and deep reasons.

Transforming a WW II flak tower in Hamburg into "The Green Bunker."

Ancient people in Taiwan yanked out healthy teeth for mysterious reasons.

Trying to exterminate the mice that are ravaging the albatross population on a remote island.

Tyler Cowen on why massively overhauling the Federal bureaucracy in the manner called for in Project 2025 would be terrible for business.

Roman military camp found in the Swiss Alps, dates to the conquest of that region under Augustus and Tiberius, I mean, if you thought high mountains would deter the Romans. . . .

Podcast on the gay rights movement in the Caribbean, argues it is stalled because activists tried to jump straight to a situation like the US or western European without essential preparatory work.

The Surgeon General says that American parents are "at their wits' end" from stress but Kevin Drum checks the numbers and finds that depending on which measure you use, stress in the US is either down or up just a little. Raising children is definitely stressful and always has been, so if you are really stress-averse maybe you shouldn't do it.

New Mexico's oil boom: it's now the second leading US state in oil production, and most of the production growth over the past few years has been in just two NM counties. Bloomberg; Reuters; NY Times. This has led to legislative efforts to limit the environmental and social damage, besides a lot of lawsuits from environmentalists. And note that while the first decade of the fracking boom was mostly a money-losing proposition, better drilling technologies and higher global prices mean companies are now earning big profits. (According to the NY Times article, fracking companies lost $140 billion in the 2010s but over the past four years have cleared more than $400 billion.)

More on Obama as an anti-socialist: his administration helped launch the private space business.

An argument that hunter-gatherers move around so much not just to find food but so they can have larger social networks.

Crazy little video of a modified swing that delivers what many children have fantasized about.

Scientists trying to use bacteria to extract valuable metals from old batteries and other tech gear. A decade ago I was bullish on the future of manufacturing with genetically-modified bacteria, which I expected would soon be making drugs and other chemicals on a vast scale, but it seems to be developing very slowly.

Anyone can experience "belonging uncertainty" – the sense that you don't belong in a particular community or situation and don't understand what is going on – and most people of every social and ethnic group have.

Interesting NY Times piece on volcano science in Iceland.

Khaled Hassan, an Egyptian dissident who lives in Britain, is impressed that Israel rescued an Israeli Arab hostage, brought him to a hospital, and then took him home, where he received a phone call from the Prime Minister. Says no Arab country, except possibly the UAE, would ever do as much for one of its citizens. "I wish every Arab lived in the state of Israel."

Poland just received its first F-35, and promotional images like this are everywhere.

Dmitri Medvedev says Russia's war in the Donbas is all about seizing mineral resources worth $7 trillion.

Russians are starting to feel like their recent advances in Donbas are too easy, and Ukraine must be saving its reserves for another surprise attack. Possibly in the south.

Short video showing how Ukrainian troops breached Russian minefields in Kursk.

More "new age of war beginning" talk from the French chief of staff.

Video showing 115 air-to-air drone kills, large Russian drones knocked down by Ukrainian quadcopters.

Meanwhile, in Chechnya: "Kadyrov awarded Kadyrov with the Order of Kadyrov."

Hating on Capitalism

This tweet perfectly sums up how many left-wing Americans feel about capitalism:

Because, I mean, how is that any different from life under socialism? (If you're going to tell me that Europeans get longer vacations, that's true, but all European societies are capitalist.)

Loved this response:

It really seems to me that many people say "capitalism" when they mean "life." What kind of system wouldn't involve most people going to school and getting jobs and going on vacations and dying? Anarchists die, too, and if they want to eat and have roofs over their heads, they have to work. Without even getting into smart phones and the Internet and streaming and lattes and avocado toast.

I remember during the weird riots in Portland some people tried to take over a city park to plant a food forest, saying that once we had free food we wouldn't have to work any more. Sigh.

A Story about Knowledge

Paul Seabright:

In the Languedoc there is a vineyard that teaches us an important lesson about textbook learning and its application to the world. In the early Seventies it was bought by a wealthy couple, who consulted professors Emile Peynaud and Henri Enjalbert, the world’s leading academic oenologist and oenological geologist respectively. Between them these men convinced the couple that their new vineyard had a theoretically ideal microclimate for wine-making. When planted with theoretically ideal vines whose fruits would be processed in the optimal way according to the up-to-date science of oenology, this vineyard had the potential to produce wine to match the great first growths of Bordeaux. The received wisdom that great wine was the product of an inscrutable (and untransferable) tradition was quite mistaken, the professors said: it could be done with hard work and a fanatical attention to detail. The couple, who had no experience of wine-making but much faith in professorial expertise, took a deep breath and went ahead.

If life were reliably like novels, their experiment would have been a disaster. In fact Aimé and Véronique Guibert have met with a success so unsullied that it would make a stupefying novel (it has already been the subject of a comatogenic work of non-fiction). The first vintage they declared (in 1978) was described by Gault Millau as ‘Château Lafite du Languedoc’; others have been praised to the heights by the likes of Hugh Johnson and Robert Parker. The wine is now on the list at the Tour d’Argent and the 1986 vintage retails at the vineyard for £65 a bottle. The sole shadow on the lives of these millionaires is cast by the odd hailstorm.

No one to whom I have begun recounting the story believes it will end well. Most people are extremely unwilling to grant that faith in textbook knowledge should ever be crowned with success. We have a very strong narrative bias against such stories. It is a bias we forget once our children fall sick or we have to travel in an aeroplane, but so long as we are in storytelling mode we simply deny that systematic textbook reasoning can make headway against whimsy and serendipity. Apart from anything else, it is deeply unfair that it should.

From a 1999 review of Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.

Apollo Lord of Hounds

Near the wonderfully named village of Nettleton Shrub in Wiltshire, England, sit the remains of a Romano-British temple. This is actually a rarer sort of thing than you might imagine; only 150 temples are known from all of Roman Britain, when medieval England and Wales had about 10,000 parish churches. Like most such constructions it had a small temple building holding the cella, or sacred sanctuary, surrounded by a bank and ditch. The Fosse Way, one of Roman Britain's most important roads, ran through the enclosure. The temple seems to have been built where the road crossed a pleasant stream.

This category of temple is known to archaeologists as a "Temple of Local Pilgrimage." That's because the main thing we find at them is offerings made by people who travelled there for some specific religious purpose. Sometimes they were offering thanks, and sometimes they were asking the god to smite somebody.

This temple seems to have been dedicated to a deity known as Apollo Cunomaglus, who is named on this altar and on other artifacts from the site. That would mean something like "Apollo Lord of Dogs," although Ronald Hutton renders it "Apollo Dog Lover."

There is also a faction that insists on translating the name as "Apollo Lord of Wolves" and tying the site to an (imagined) ancient Celtic wolf cult. Given that the people of Roman Britain raised a lot of sheep I doubt they venerated wolves, so I am going with the dog people on this one. But even if we settle on dogs we still have not ended the argument, because one faction of dog people says this means dogs as the best friends of men and sheep and another faction wants to talk about dogs as guardians of the underworld. 

The most famous artifact from the site is a curse tablet that says

I give to the god Maglus him who did wrong from the slave-quarters; I give him who (did) theft from the slave-quarters; who stole the cloak of Servandus. . . . I give (that the god Maglus) before the ninth day take away him who stole the cloak of Servandus.

The inscription includes a list of twenty possibly culprits, one of which was later crossed out, so the god had a little help here.

Given that the temple straddled a much-used road, some historians think it likely served as a sort of inn, offering accommodations and food to travelers in exchange for "offerings." But there isn't any physical evidence of this, beyond the location.

Here is a quick history of the site from the National Heritage List:

The temple itself was situated on the south bank of the Broadmead Brook. In its first phase, built soon after AD 69, it comprised a simple circular shrine. In about AD 230 the shrine was surrounded by an octagonal podium and precinct wall with a gatehouse but 20 years later the whole structure was burnt. It was replaced with an octagonal temple incorporating the remains of the podium. The new temple was more elaborate and comprised an inner chamber or cella surrounded by eight chambers and enclosed by a covered walkway. This coincides with the most prolific building period within the complex and reflects a growing interest in the temple. 

Here is a nice little artifact from the temple's glory days.

But eventually the empire ran down and the legions left and everything went to hell:

By the early fourth century the temple had fallen into a state of disrepair and was adapted and repaired. Alternate chambers were blocked and the plan of the building took on a cruciform aspect, possibly reflecting the conversion of Rome to Christianity. At a slightly later date, the building was once again used for pagan worship. A makeshift altar was constructed of reused columns. After AD 370 a build up of straw, manure, animal bones and household rubbish imply that the building was being used as a homestead or animal byre. Disarticulated human bones at the top of the sequence displayed cut marks particularly to the neck, implying a massacre at the hands of raiders.

And so it passed into history, until archaeologists showed up to poke around its ruins and bring its story back into the world. 

Ronald Hutton and the Checklist of Egyptian Magic

Stela Depicting Tutu, a Protective Spirit often Evoked in Roman Egypt

Ronald Hutton is a historian of British religion who has written books about everything from the Druids to Oliver Cromwell. I don't really recommend his books because he is the kind of historian who thinks that telling cool stories might call his scholarly credentials into question. "The sources do not really sustian. . ."

Which makes him, in a way, the perfect historian to take on his topic in this one-hour lecture: the western magical tradition. The western tradition of learned magic really is just a long string of books mainly composed of pieces of other books, without any very cool stories, and Hutton is the man to give us that.

Like every other authority I know, he traces the tradition to Egypt. But not to the Old Kingdom; he focuses on the Greco-Roman period. See, in ancient Egypt there was no distinction between religion and magic. What look to us like spells or other magical acts were used to compel gods, and nobody found this strange. Enter the Greeks, who were strongly prejudiced against using magic to force the gods. The gods, they thought, should be approached in an attitude of humble prayer. So they began driving magical practice out of the temples, and the Romans finished the job. This left Egypt's magician-priests without employment or income. They found, though, that there was still a big public appetite for the services they used to render as priests, so they went into private practice. It with these men, the private magicians of Greco-Roman Egypt, that our magical tradition really begins. They mixed old Egyptian lore with bits and pieces of other religions and styles of magic, always with an eye toward pleasing the customer. The continuity from our oldest papyrus fragments to 16th-century grimoires is amazingly strong, with long sentences surviving word-for-word across 1500 years. Hutton mentions that the Egyptians describe how to make pens from papyrus, how to achieve various effects with olive oil lamps, and how to make potions from the hearts of hoopoes, and these same formulae appear in books written in Scotland or Sweden by men who had never seen any of these things.

Image from a Greek Magical Papyrus, Roman Period

I was moved to write about this lecture for two reasons. The first was Hutton's insistence that our distinction between religion, which is good, and magic, which is at least suspect and probably sinister, goes back to Roman Egypt. The basic idea that religious people beseech the gods while magicians try to manipulate them is found in Roman legal texts. In the second century AD there were even pogroms against magicians that may have been bigger than any carried out in Renaissance Europe. But magic was, he says, like the drugs of the ancient world, in that it may have been illegal but everyone knew where to find it.

The second reason was Hutton's Checklist of Egyptian Magic. When you see all of this stuff, he says, you are in the magical tradition of imperial Egypt:

Emphasis on the physical and moral purity of the practitioner.
A willingness to command and personify deities.
The importation of foreign, exotic deities and spirits.
The employment of animal, vegetable and mineral substances.
The use of images, especially statues.
A belief in the power of the spoken word and knowing true names.
Use of obscure, ancient, or made-up languages – “gobbledygook.”
The use of human mediums.
The gathering of spells in books.

And this does strike me as a useful primer on the stuff learned magicians have done throughout the past 2,000 years.

Hutton identifies three major additions to the tradition, one coming from each of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Jewish contribution is the invocation of angels and the power of the one true name of God. Medieval Christian magi pioneered a focus on mathematical and especially geometrical manipulations – magic squares, pentagrams, magic circles. Medieval Islamic magi emphasized what Hutton calls Astral magic, that is, tying magical operations to the sun, the moon, and the stars. (Which, he adds, probably came from ancient Mesopotamia, but it was in medieval Islam that this was fused to the Egyptian tradition.)

Since this is the thing I write about, I note again the complete lack of any theoretical underpinnings for these practices. Not once in his hour of talking does Hutton say a single word about why any of this was supposed to work. In his telling it developed through the interaction of magicians with their clients, and those practices survived that sold the best to the kind of people who consulted magicians. It was then preserved because it was old and presumably authoritative.

End of Summer Coming

Drove my youngest daughter back to college yesterday for her sophomore year. Standing here in front of the door to her suite. I have always loved transporting my children because that is when we have the best conversations. This time we talked a lot about college and dorm life, and I told stories about how I met my friends at Yale, filling me with nostalgia.

On the way she remembered that she was supposed to bring a broom and dustpan for her suite. So we stopped at a Target along the way. Getting back in the car I said, "Mission accomplished." She said, "Dad, this was just a side quest."

The dog has been injured, so instead of running in the woods he has just been getting little walks around the neighborhood. Which has not been without its excitement, because there is a whole herd of deer that hangs out in the woods that border on the condominium complex down the street. Here Kidu tries to break the leash to get off after this fawn.

Does standing about twenty yards from us in a little strip of woods between the condos and a townhouse development. I think they stand there boldly like this, sometimes as little as 15 feet away, because they want to make sure the dog sees them and, should he break free, chases them instead of their fawns. They have no fear that one suburban dog is going to catch them.

And then one afternoon we saw the whole herd together, buck, two does, and two sets of twin fawns. If this buck is the father then he really hit the jackpot this year. Deer are one of the mammal species that control the number of offspring based on how well fed they are early in pregnancy, so it must have been a very good winter for deer. There are fawns everywhere, at least three sets of twins just within our walking radius. Lousy picture because we were a long way off. I had my camera out to get a better shot when Kidu starting barking, something I have never seem him do around deer. This many at once just overwhelmed him.

Meanwhile, in the garden. It was cool last week, and the flowers came back nicely after wilting in the heat of the two weeks before the hurricane.

The Obscene Bird of Night

Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.

― Henry James Sr., letter to his sons Henry and William

Links 23 August 2024

Perseid Meteor Shower over Stonehenge by Josh Dury.

Lots more cool stuff at his web site.

Italian researchers claim to have found a description of the exact location of Plato's tomb in one of the charred papyri from Herculaneum. The text is a history of the Academy, which might turn out to be a valuable source on ancient philosophy if enough can be read.

The world's biggest renewable/storage electrical project has just been approved for northern Australia. The plan is that much of the power will be transmitted to Singapore along an undersea cable 4300 km (2700 miles) long.

Interesting carved stone found in Poland, in a Viking style but seems to depict a Christian priest or bishop.

New regulations promulgated by the Department of Interior under the Native American Graves Protection Act are so confusing that nobody seems to know what they require, and some museums are removing their Native American exhibits and cutting off access to their collections until the dust settles and they know what's what. Some archaeologists are afraid this will mean the loss of collections for decades, if not forever.

Scientists can buy citations on the black market to up the citation count of their publications.

Sabine Hossenfelder on recycling nuclear waste, and getting more energy from it, 5-minute video.

Kevin Drum reports that California's big tech companies are giving up on DEI initiatives. Not only do they irritate people, they have had no impact on the number of female employees, which continues to decline.

Photos and video from the annual Bosch parade in the Netherlands.

Rock layers found on uninhabited Scottish islands seem to preserve a geological record spanning the beginning of the massive ice age known as Snowball Earth, c. 720 million years ago. 

Wreck of the HMS Hawke, a cruiser sunk by a German torpedo in 1914, has been found off the coast of Scotland in "remarkable" condition.

Alex Tabarrok on the intellectual roots of modern YIMBYism.

Russians using video games – in this case Hearts of Iron mods – to spread the message that Russia is helping Africans fight western imperialists.

Bonkers profile of Palmer Luckey, who invented the Oculus Rift, got fired from Meta for hanging out in right-wing chat rooms and supporting Trump, and then founded defense AI company Anduril. I'm irritated that Google won't find me a photograph of his Henry VIII costume.

Video of Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov driving a Cybertruck with mounted machine gun. Interesting times.

I hear from a friend who teaches at a local community college that of the 3257 students who tried to sign up this spring and summer, 2124 were spam bots. They had to implement a new, much slower, manual sign-up process to fight the plague.

Beavers have been reintroduced to northern England and seem to be thriving. Mark my words, in a decade they're going to have so many beavers they're going to be fighting about killing them.

Speaking of which, a fatal brown bear attack in Romania led the country to dramatically raise its hunting quota. It's been a long time since European countries had problems with wildlife running amok, but now there are tense debates about the killing of boar, deer, bears, wolves, and soon (I'm sure) beavers.

From this little story about a dead oarfish washing up in California I discover that dead oarfish are considered a terrible omen in Japan, possibly predicting earthquakes. For some reason I am seeing a lot of chatter about big earthquakes in the near future. Are there oarfish washing up, or is there some more serious evidence?

Weirdly fascinating NY Times piece by Rowena Chiu, who was Harvey Weinstein's personal assistant, about the quandary faced by Matthew Perry's personal assistant. Celebrities expect their assistants to do whatever they are told, including lie for them or procure drugs for them. How much blame should fall on these assistants? Should we expect them to resign rather than buy ketamine?

The organism that made the mysterious fossilized burrows known as bifungites has been identified: a small, segmented worm. (NY Times, original paper)

Via Tyler Cowen, a list of what are said to be the most widely read books in Silicon Valley. 

Interesting comment from Belarusian dictator Lukashenko on why Belarus won't join the war: "They [the Ukrainians] have constantly told us, and the Westerners, that they don't need a war with Belarus. We understand this and say that we are not going to fight with you. And not because you are good. But because we are not ready to increase the front by 1200 kilometers. Here is the entire border - 1200 km. Now the "SMO" front is 1000 km. Are we ready to close 1200 kilometers? No. And Kursk has shown this."

In the midst of Ukraine's offensive into Kursk there's a fight over bridges over the Seym River. Ukraine has blown up all the old bridges, so the Russians have been setting up pontoon bridges. Turns out, though, that pontoon bridges are highly vulnerable to drone attacks, and so are engineers trying to build them.

Statistics on how many of the various kinds of Russian missiles Ukraine has been shooting down.

People counting Russian prisoners from Kursk in Ukrainian videos are up to 507 as of August 20. Some have no doubt been missed, but experience shows that we see imagery of most Russian group surrenders. Rumors of thousands of prisoners taken during Ukraine's 2022 offensive turned out to be false, and the people who said "If there were that many prisoners, we would have seen pictures" turned out to be right.

Hilarious bid for the F-bomb world record by a Russian watching a drone attack on an airbase.

Chatter that the US is moving away from its very ambitious NGAD program toward a plane that would be smaller, cheaper, and built for easy upgrades.

Thread arguing that Ukraine's Kursk offensive is slowing down because they don't have enough trucks to supply the 30 or so battalions already deployed.

Dmitri of War Translated: "Every morning in Russia now is a Groundhog Day: drones are flying, an oil depot is burning somewhere, another military convoy was destroyed, Putin visited places that have nothing to do with the war. Every single morning. The special operation is going according to plan."

MIT Admissions after the End of Affirmative Action

Asian: up from 40% to 47%

White: down from 38% to 37%

Black: down from 15% to 5%

Hispanic: down from to 16% to 11%

American Indian and Native Hawaiian: down, but still 1%

Note that all ethnicities are self-reported by students, and they could check more than one box.

Sources: last year, this year

Having or Not Having Children

Interesting interview with two philosophers, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, who wrote a book around the question of whether to have children. To start with, this:

Anastasia Berg: When people think about the way in which the role of children in human life, especially in the West, has changed, they often think in terms of children no longer conferring the same advantages. They’re not useful in the same way that they used to be, say, economically. And people talk about the rising cost or sacrifices that they demand. On this model, having children is a possible choice that was more advantageous before and has become less so now. But we think there’s been a far more radical shift in the role of children in our lives. In the past, children were understood as an essential part of a well-lived human life. Human life was understood, essentially, to be intergenerational. It wasn’t just that an individual happened to be related to people, it was essential to who you were. What’s new is not that people find kids are less advantageous, but that they’re considered one possible project among many that one can choose. And once they’ve taken on this framing, compared to the other things one can pursue in life, and considering the costs and sacrifices and risks that, historically, children almost always implied, it’s not surprising that people are finding it hard to justify.

I think this is exactly right. All the stuff about affordability is nonsense; my wife and I have raised five children as nurse and an archaeologist. Some people don't have children because they never find a partner, but married people who don't have children have just decided to do something else.

The interviewer asks:

You speak specifically about a societal evolution that you call the end of “the motherhood mandate.” And you quote a pair of sociologists who say that the “oughtness” that used to be associated with parenthood has been removed for a substantial number of people. 

To which Berg, again, responds with a little discourse about how the argument among feminists over whether motherhood enslaved or empowered women ended with a sort of truce: every woman gets to choose.

In their book Berg and Wiseman note that anti-natalist arguments are ancient. Asked about this point, Berg says:

From the early days, when people asked any philosophical questions, they asked whether human life is so miserable and so full of harm and tribulation that perhaps it is better not to perpetuate it. This argument took two guises. The first is the argument from suffering: human life is full of unhappiness, whether actual or potential, and of so many risks that from the standpoint of the individual, it’s better to never have been born. And from the standpoint of a prospective parent, it is outright irresponsible, maybe morally negligent, to subject another human being to such a fate. There is also the argument from evil. This starts not with the premise of human suffering, but of human character: human beings are bad and evil and harmful. In a theological register, we talk about fallenness and essential corruption of the human heart. And from this, we’re led to the conclusion that it would be morally irresponsible to have more of these beings—whether because we’re perpetuating evil in the world or, in the environmental register of today, because we’re harming the planet.

We bring this up not just to historicize our present moment. We want to show that what is experienced as a contemporary concern is, in fact, pointing to a deep philosophical question: that of the value of human life in the present and future. We also want to point to what is unique about our moment today. While this question was raised historically, it was raised theoretically, abstractly, as an intellectual exercise. What’s different today is that people feel they need to justify that choice in the face of these arguments.

I generally think of childbearing as a personal choice and I wouldn't judge anyone for not having children. But when I think about the universe, I absolutely do see a positive role for humanity in the future. We are the ones who know. Other species are in amazing in their own ways, but we are the ones who have mapped the galaxy, parsed the atom, and walked on the Moon; we are the ones who write epics and build cathedrals and come up with theories about how everything came to be. It may be that we will eventually hand this role over to others, to conscious machines or human/machine hybrids. But it seems very sad to me to imagine a universe with no inhabitants that can appreciate its scale, its intricacy, and its wonder. I think we belong here.