Wooden Churches of the Carpathians

Drohobych, Church of St. George 

A few years ago Poland and Ukraine got together to create a UNESCO World Heritage Site for the Wooden Churches of the Carpathians. So there are a bunch of good photographs of these. 

Paraskewy, Poland

The dating of some of these seems to be iffy; UNESCO says "They were built of horizontal wooden logs between the 16th and 19th centuries by communities of Orthodox and Greek Catholic faiths."

This one is cool but the photographs are unlabelled. We're falling well short of German, French, or even Mexican standards of documentation here. Some of the photographs are also terrible, and I had to GIMP them to make them visible. (Sorry, can't afford photoshop.)

Nyzhnij Verbizh, Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin

Notice that many of the churches have three sections, which is a reference to the Trinity.

Anyway, I find these delightful.

Late Fall

Links 14 November 2025

Silver drachma from Thrace, c. 450 BC

Michael Shainblum at Yosemite, amazing photographs. More at his web site.

Federal court dismisses a lawsuit brought against pollster J. Ann Selzer for publishing a 2024 poll that found Harris in the lead in Iowa.

An argument that our world is ugly because nobody cares.

Scott Siskind asks what is behind the disappearance of homeless tent camps from San Francisco.

Conservative Christian Rod Dreher against Groyperism and Nick Fuentes: "Jews are the canary in the coal mine."

Sarah Kliff in the NY Times against continuous fetal monitoring during labor, which she argues leads to unnecessary C-sections. Those of us in the natural birth movement have been saying that for 40 years.

On Twitter/X, a cry from the heart by an old-line constitutional conservative against what is happening on the right.

Meet Spitfire, the champion of jumping dogs, 12-minute video.

A report that many Somalis in Minneapolis did not vote for Somali mayoral candidate Omar Fateh because he belongs to a rival clan.

An argument that China will allow mass immigration to solve its looming labor shortage. Japan and Korea cannot, because they are democracies, but the Chinese dictatorship can. (Twitter/X) I do not believe this at all.

Review of the big Rashid Johnson retrospective at the Guggenheim, with pictures.

Review of a book by a cranky conservative environmentalist who hates modernity, economic growth, the trans movement, and a whole lot more.

Aerial photographs of the camps built in the Saudi desert for the workers building Neom, their apparently failed dream of a great linear city.

Bonkers theory about a bonkers archaeolocial site, the "Band of Holes" in southern Peru. More here. I don't believe it but I don't have any other ideas.

Mostly sail-powered cargo ship crosses the Atlantic, 3-minute video.

Ukraine claims a major success using its domestically-built "Long Neptune" cruise missiles (old-fashioned Neptunes sank the Moskva), striking the Russian port of Novorossiysk and shutting down its oil terminal. Reuters, Twitter/X, video on Twitter/X. As part of this attack the missiles struck a Russian S-300/400 SAM battery, creating a huge explosion. Long-rang cruise missiles are now something any industrial state can build in quantity. The long debate in the US over whether to supply Ukraine with Tomahawks is pretty much moot, since Ukraine can build their own serviceable missiles and European states are ramping up production of the very effective Storm Shadow.

The Deathbed Scene Wars

In the 1600s and 1700s many intellectuals rejected Christianity or Judaism and adopted positions toward religion rooted in abstract philosophy. Spinoza, for example, who thought that God was the universe and thus always acted according to the universe's laws. Others were what we could call deists. These ideas were often attacked by contemporaries as "atheism."

I just learned, from Jonathan Israel's The Radical Enlightenment, that public fights often broke out about how these men died. "Freethinkers' deathbed scenes, accordingly, were of great significance and generally bitterly contested." It was widely believed that these rebels would recant and embrace traditional relgion on their deathbeds, and stories that they had were widely told. These stories were then vehemently denounced by the philosophers' friends in flame wars that sometimes went on for years. When Spinoza died, according to his first biographer, he instructed that no clergyman be allowed into the house, lest such a person spread a false story of deathbed conversion. Didn't matter, such stories were spread anyway, although I suppose they were less convincing when all the people who had been there agreed on a different version. 

While he was alive, the most famous and widely read thing that Adam Smith had written was his account of the death of David Hume, another freethinker denounced as an atheist. Like Spinoza, Hume managed just fine without traditional relgion; Smith described him as "cheerful to the end."

I find this to be a fascinating glimpse into what many people believe about others.

Plockhoyists on Delaware Bay

Pieter Corneliszoon Plockhoy was a Dutch Mennonite and radical social thinker born around 1625. He spent time in England during the 1650s and hung out with the Levellers and others interested in forming utopian communes. Based on this experience, and his wide reading, he wrote a pamphlet called A Way Propounded to Make the Poor of these and Other Nations Happy. 

Plockhoy's aim was to create a "little commonwealth" separate from the rest of society, an elite of work and spiritual values based on co-operative principles in order that "we may better eschew the yoke of the temporall and spirituall pharaohs, who have long enough domineered over our bodies and souls and set up again (as in former times) righteousness, love and brotherly sociableness, which are scarce any where to be found." The co-operative was to share ownership, risk, capital, and work, and no form of hierarchy or leadership of any kind would be allowed. Profits would be shared amont he members equitably.

Plockhoy even had a plan for child care:

because only a quarter of the women were required for cleaning and cooking when groups of families lived together in communal complexes or settlements, three quarters of the women and girls, he urges, would be free to engage in same manual labor as the men.

There could be no clergy of any kind, so that in religion there would be 

"no preheminency, or sole privilege . . . of offering anything or of speaking first." Consequently, such a co-operative would need to vet prospective new members to ensure only "honest, rationall, impartiall persons", that is, personalities free from rigid confessional allegiances as well as vice, were admitted.

(Various sources, including wikipedia, say that Plockhoy was an advocate for "unrestricted religious toleration," but note that among those he excluded from his own community were Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and anyone else who believed in having ministers or priests.)

Having articulated this vision, Plockhoy then set about trying to establish a community of like-minded people based on his social/religious ideas. He tried first in England, but could not get sponsorship. So he went back to the Netherlands and began organizing a colonial venture in Dutch North America.

In 1663 Plockhoy, his wife, their blind son, and about 40 other people landed on Horekil Creek in what is now Delaware; most people think Horekil Creek was what we call Lewes Creek, which would put the settlement in Lewes, but nobody has ever found remains of it, so I think that remains uncertain. Alas for our utopian settlers, their dream was cut short by the outbreak of war between England and the Netherlands the following year; the settlement was burned by the English and the people seem to have dispersed, although Plockhoy and his family may have continued to live in Lewes for some years. And that, alas, seems to be all we know about Plockhoy's communist experiment.

But until today I had never heard of Plockhoy at all, despite being the author of multiple reports and articles on colonial Delaware, so it find this all delightful. What do you suppose happened to those settlers? And can you imagine the conversations they had with other Dutch, Swedish, and British settlers, and the ideas that might have spread out from their strange seed?

Incidentally Plockhoy's collected writings are still in print, including a Kindle edition.

Fascinating.

Quotations are from Jonathan Israel, The Radical Enlightenment, on which more later.

Rod Dreher in Groyperland

Conservative Christian writer Rod Dreher just spent a few days in Washington investigating claims that many young Republican operatives have gotten into anti-Semitism and Fascism. He reports:

The claim that I first floated in this space last week, quoting a DC insider who said that in his estimation, “between 30 and 40 percent” of the Zoomers who work in official Republican Washington are fans of Nick Fuentes — that’s true. Was confirmed multiple times by Zoomers who live in that world.

If you think being Christian is some kind of vaccination against anti-Semitism, you’re wrong. Even young Christians — especially trad Catholics, I learned — are neck-deep in anti-Semitism. They even use it as a litmus test of who can and can’t join their informal social groups.

Not every DC Zoomercon who identifies with Fuentes agrees with everything he says, or the way he says it. What they like most of all is his rage, and willingness to violate taboos. I asked one astute Zoomer what the Groypers actually wanted (meaning, what were their demands). He said, “They don’t have any. They just want to tear everything down.”

Then he went on to explain in calm, rational detail why his generation is so utterly screwed. The problems are mostly economic and material, in his view (and this is something echoed by other conversations). They don’t have good career prospects, they’ll probably never be able to buy a home, many are heavily indebted with student loans that they were advised by authorities to take out, and the idea that they are likely to marry and start families seems increasingly remote.

Moreover, they grew up in a country that had lost its common culture. Many of these young men are fatherless. Most of them spent their youths being told that as whites, and especially as white males, they are what’s wrong with the world. Their own speech was policed with Stasi-like ruthlessness for racism and bigotry, while people on the Left routinely slandered whites, males, Christians, and heterosexuals — and were even rewarded for it.

F—k that, seems to be the reaction now. Fuentes is a living, breathing illustration of what Hannah Arendt meant when she spoke of people willing to revel in transgression such that they tear down the pillars of civilization, just for the fun of seeing those who had been gatekept away breaching containment.

Notice that these guys believe all the same things about our economy that Mamdani voters believe. It isn't true, but it is driving extremism across the political spectrum. I agree with these young men that they took a lot of execrable abuse over being straight white men, but the idea that the US ever had a "common culture" is absurd. And they seem to be discarding two of the things most of us have had in common: devotion to democracy and hatred of tyrants.

Peter Thiel on Why Young People are Socialists

Peter Thiel began predicting that young Americans would turn to socialism as far back as 2010, so he is not at all surprised by the popularity of Mamdani et al. Why did he predict this? 

If you graduated in 1970 with no student debt, compare that to the millennial experience: too many people go to college, they don’t learn anything, and they end up with incredibly burdensome debt. Student debt is a version of this generational conflict that I’ve talked about for a long time.

The rupture of the generational compact isn’t limited to student debt, either. I think you can reduce 80 percent of culture wars to questions of economics—like a libertarian or a Marxist would—and then you can reduce maybe 80 percent of economic questions to questions of real estate.

So Peter Thiel and I agree on some important points: that financing college with debt is a terrible idea, because it leads to young people trying to start their lives in a deep hole, and that one of main reasons we have to do that is that too many people go to college. I also agree that we have a long-term problem with taxing young people to fund the retirements and health care of the elderly, what he calls "generational conflict."

About housing costs, I am not so sure. It is certainly true that housing prices in New York City and Silicon Valley are very high. But is there any conceivable program that would change that? NYC has built a ton of housing over the past 25 years, but it is not enough, and I am not convinced that we could ever do enough. Hong Kong is wall to wall high rise apartment buildings, but housing there is still far more expensive than in the average Chinese village. When tons of people want to live in a place, the cost of housing goes up. 

If there is a long-run solution to high housing costs, it is enabling people to live good lives in cheaper places. Housing is cheap in Akron and Omaha. So long as 50 million people want to live in NYC and the Bay Area, many of them are just out of luck.

That being said, we could be doing quite a bit to make housing more affordable: zoning reforms, ratcheting back building codes, etc. We could also bring down utility costs by just building a ton more solar power, and requiring utilities to set-up their systems to better accomodate dispersed solar power (like rooftop units).

But if the complaint is, "I want an affordable two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn," I don't know the solution.

Middle Eastern Art at Christie's

An Armenian Repoussé Gold and Enamelled Bowl Kayseri, Ottoman Turkey, Early 18th Century.

Koran page by Ahmad Hamdi Ibn Ahmad, Probably Istanbul, dated 21 January 1800 AD

Bracelet, Seljuk, c. 1200.

Silver and brass bowl, Syria, c. 1450

Two Angels, Ottoman, 16th Century

Iznik Tile, c. 1565. This sold for  £33,000

Gilt Oval Astronomical Verge Watch, Istanbul, c. 1670.

Many more here.

Narnia and the Gate

NY Times feature on the 75th anniversary of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, with several authors commenting on what it meant to them. Katherine Rundell: "Narnia thrilled me like no other place. It taught me to long for big pleasures: for enchanted landscapes and ancient truths, for redemptions and reversals. . . . I had a school friend who was so passionately in love with Mr. Tumnus that she has ever since found it hard to reconcile herself to dating adult men."

For me Narnia heightened my fascination with finding a door that I could step through into another world, which has at times in my life sharpened into pain that I could not. It was that transition that obsessed me more than the world or the stories. There were other worlds that I liked better – Middle Earth, Lloyd Alexander's Wales – but they did not come with that wonderful means of access.

For the cover of The Raven and the Crown I selected an old painting titled The Enchanted Gate.

If you wonder why I write novels despite being a busy career man and father of five, and despite getting zero encouragement from the publishing world, it is this: because in writing stories I have finally found my gate to the Other Lands.

Links 7 November 2025

Sleeping Cupid Statue recently unearthed

in Croatia, 2nd Century AD

Trump fires all the members of the DC Commission of Fine Arts so they can't oppose his Triumphal Arch.

The Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza is horrendous. When will modernism die? Donald Trump, are you seeing this? (Dezeen, CBS, Arch Daily)

Amazing radio image of the Milky Way.

Noah Smith on the problems the world faces as populations in rich nations fall and those in poor countries continue to grow.

Amen to this, from pourteaux on Twitter/X: "both liberals and leftists would appreciate it if you quit using our labels interchangeably."

Reuters on the Trump family's Crypto corruption.

Map of SNAP use across the US. In Clark County, Idaho, 31% of families use SNAP; In Baltimore it's 26%.

Univerity of Austin announces a policy of free tuition.

Sumo wrestlers touristing in London.

Some images from the Bloomsbury Jamboree of Books and Prints, via Spitalfields Life.

Richard Hanania on why Groyperism is accelerating, and why it is more dangerous than wokeness.

What It's Like to Be Wrongly Charged by Trump's Department of Justice.

UCal's insane fingerprinting requirements for anyone who interacts with minors may kill their famous math program for young stars.

People who write for AI. And Scott Siskind's response.

Chinese seafaring, good article at Smithsonian, with special reference to the "porcelain wrecks" we have discussed here before. Note that the known Chinese shipwrecks are pretty big but nowhere near as big as the huge vessels mentioned in Chinese chronicles, which I consider more evidence that those numbers are made up.

Some neurologists are focusing on brain states that seem to be in between sleep and waking.

Paper disk creations by Jacob Hashimoto.

Fourteenth-century frescoes that had been covered by whitewash revealed in Siena.

Alex Tabarrok on why rooftop solar is lagging in the US.

On Twitter/X, a claim that AI-written cover letters and resumes are distorting the job application process.

Cultured chocolate.

Text of the recently approved parents' rights amendment to the Texas constitution: "To enshrine truths that are deeply rooted in this nation's history and traditions, the people of Texas hereby affirm that a parent has the responsibility to nurture and protect the parent's child and the corresponding fundamental right to exercise care, custody, and control of the parent's child, including the right to make decisions concerning the child's upbringing." Not clear is this will have any effect, since Texas alread has a law that says pretty much the same thing, but there is a strong desire in many American parents that their schools not expose their children to homosexuality, trans stuff, or whatever the next culturally leftist idea is.

A claim that some Russian oil refinery managers enjoy being attacked by Ukrainian drones, because this allows them to steal lots of product to sell on their own behalf, besides getting large insurance settlements.

Ukraine claims that its STING anti-drone drones have made more than 1,000 intereceptions of Russian Shahed-style drones. Drone vs. drone is the future.

The Aga Khan Collection

Some amazing works from the collection of Princess Catherine and Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, auctioned at Christie's. Above, A Prince Hawking (detail). Attributed to Muhammad Ali, Mughal India, circa 1610 

The Nayika in Distress. Unknown Artist, Guler, Himachal Pradesh, India, circa 1770-80.

Maharao Umed Singh (r. 1771-1819) and Zalim Singh Hunting Tigers. Signed by Shaykh Taju, Kotah, Rajasthan, India, dated Samvat 38 / 1781 A.D.

The Festival of Nandmahotsav Mewar, Rajasthan, India, c. 1880.

Portrait of Sha Abu'l-Ma'ali of Kashgar. Portrait by Dust Muhammas, Mughal India, c. 1560. 

Eight Horse Merchants from the Fraser Album, Unknown Artist, Delhi, India, c. 1820

A Royal Procession of Raja Tulsa Ji of Tanjore, c. 1775.

Thoughts on Vampirism

From a review of a new book by John Blair, Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World. A couple of cases:

There is the record of Michal Kasparak, for example, a wine merchant in the Slovakian town of Lubló, whose death in 1718 didn’t stop him from wreaking havoc; he returned on a white horse from the grave, attacking members of the community, starting fires, collecting debts from those who owed him money, all while also managing to impregnate his widow and four other women. (Only after his heart was burned did Kasparak finally give up the ghost.) And there is the story of Johann Kunze, who was kicked in the testicles by a horse and, despite not sustaining any other injury, died in great pain. On his deathbed he renounced any hope of salvation; as he died a black cat rushed in and scratched his face. The men charged with burying him were disconcerted when one hand repeatedly moved to his genitals, but they managed to get him underground anyway, only to subsequently discover he was a revenant, returning to cause mayhem throughout his hometown of Bennisch in Moravia.

I thought this was interesting:

What separates the vampire from the ghost or the demon is that it’s a corpse. As such, many writers on vampires have focused on physical aspects of decay: A corpse that is unexpectedly preserved or bloated or bloody is often suspected of being a vampire. But Blair argues that this in and of itself is not enough. Rather, he notes, the single most common cause that leads to a revenant body is “uncompleted ritual.” For many cultures, death is not just a physical event; it’s also a social process, and if the burial rites are incomplete, interrupted, or denied, the dead body becomes problematic. The souls or life forces of the departed are now stuck: As Blair explains, they “cannot return to human life, but nor can they move on, so that their needy, envious personalities lurk poisonously in their physical bodies.” Abnormal physical processes during decomposition may strengthen a belief in vampires, but it is the social belief that comes first. After all, why dig up a corpse to check for signs if you didn’t already suspect it of causing trouble?

Several of Blair's cases concern people who cause trouble after death because they were punished for crimes during life by denial of the complete burial ritual.

Individual vampires were often the recently deceased whose misdeeds and poor behavior in life had returned to haunt them: the walking dead, “noxious by nature,” could become “dark mirrors for the noxious living.” Particularly in England, which by the tenth century had started denying burial rites to undesirables such as perjurers, thieves, and philanderers, only to have those same people return as vampires. Belief in vampires became another way of enforcing social mores.

But what social mores are being enforced here? Could it maybe be that people were protesting the denial of full burial rites to petty criminals by claiming that those folks were coming back as vampires? If those not buried in consecrated ground come back to haunt the living, doesn't that imply they should have been buried in consecrated ground? 

I think one of the essential points about all such discussions is that past people disagreed about things like ghosts and curses just as much as we do. One model of what is going on here is that people who were suspected of philandering or thievery while they were alive were controversial characters in the village, and that any decision to deny them proper burial would also be controversial, and whether to blame them for any strange incidents that happened after their burials would also be controversial. We know that the people who dug up corpses to see if they were returning often did so at night or otherwise in semi-secrecy, which implies that some people opposed such acts. I find that it sometimes makes sense to see these incidents – digging up corpses, deciding if they had the signs of vampirism, deciding if they were to blame for dead sheep – as points made within an ongoing dispute over the standing of some people in the community.

People Notice

UMichVoter on Twitter/X: 

A very South Asian precinct in Edison, NJ has swung from Trump +30 to Sherrill (Dem) +76.

Meanwhile in Virginia, Democrat Abigail Spanberger got nearly 75% in heavily Asian precincts of Loudoun County, some of which Trump won.

Asian Americans were there for Republicans to take, after so many fights over education and crime, but Trump, Miller & Co. threw that away.

Trump also ran very well with Black voters, especially, men, but yesterday in New Jersey Sherrill probably got 95-99% of the Black vote. 

Wampum

You probably all know what wampum is, those strings or belts of shell beads made by Indians of the northeastern US. Traditionally they were made of two species of mollusks, quahog clams (purple) and channeled whelks (white). Individual beads were sometimes used as decoration, but the height of the art was making long "belts" that encoded particular messsages or stories. The one above, by contemporary Wampanoag artist Donald “Slender Birch” Widdiss, tells the story of the Wampanoag people on Martha's Vineyard.

The most famous piece of wampum is the Hiawatha Belt, which commemorates the formation of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois League. (This event has been dated everywhere from the 1100s AD to 1600; I belong to the school that puts it around 1450 AD.)

Here's another famous piece, which commemorates the Great Treaty between William Penn and several Indian nations.

And here is a photograph from 1870 that shows several Haudenosaunee chiefs holding wampum belts that record important events in Iroquois history.

Making shell beads is ancient, perhaps one of humanity's oldest art forms, and we know that making Wampum predates European arrival in New England. But how far back the practice goes is a hard question. If the Hiawatha belt dates to 1450, that would make it the oldest specimen known; the oldest archaeological evidence dates to the 1500s. 

Almost all the surviving Wampum in the world, and, most likely, most of the Wampum that has ever been made, dates to after 1600. This is for two reasons. First, it is far, far easier to make the beads with metal tools. These tools (awls, drills) seem to have been one of the first things Natives sought from European traders, since there are shell beads dated by archaeologists to the mid 1500s that were made with metal tools.

Second, the creation of the fur trade economy with its far-reaching merchantile ties made it much easier for Native craftspeople to focus their time on particular tasks. From the late 1500s down to at least 1750, these beads circulated across New England as money. They could be traded for anything. So the Penobscots, who lived around Long Island Sound, began to specialize in Wampum manufacture. Wampum could be traded to the Iroquois or other inland groups for furs or corn, and it could be traded to Europeans for metal tools, guns, cloth, or salted fish. The amount of Wampum being made skyrocketed. Its use also spread, as far as North Carolina to the south and northward into the St. Lawrence Valley.

The "George Washinton Belt", recording  the 1794 treaty between the United States and the Iroquois League.

In the 1700s its use declined, because of the destruction of the coastal tribes and the spread of other trading media, like money. But it never disappeared. The Iroquois continue to make belts to commemorate important events, and it is a major focus of some Native craftspeople.

I wanted to write about this because I am fascinated that so much of what we think of as American Indian culture actually arose from the encounter between Native peoples and Europeans. 

Nunalleq, After the Typhoon

Nunalleq is an archaeological site in western Alaska that dates to between 700 and 400 years ago. The site was never lost and the Yu'pik people who used to live there now live just a few miles away. Over the past twenty years Nunalleq has been eroding into the see, and the locals reached out to archaeologists to help them recover artifacts from the site before it disappeared. This led to a very fruitful cooperation between local people and archaeologists from the University of Aberdeen, and the establishment of a local museum. I have written about this site here twice before (2014, 2019).

Wooden artifacts from Nunalleq

Then last month the remains of Typhoon Halong slammed into the coast, eating 60 feet into the land and washing away most of the site. People began finding artifacts all along the shore, like the wooden mask at the top of the post. In the NY Times, Sachi Kitajima Mulkey has a good article about the effort to recover artifacts from the beach and the ongoing debate among the Yu'pik over whether they should move their village even farther from the sea. Climate change has not yet had much impact across most of the world, but in the arctic the impact has already been profound.

Hôtel Solvay

The Hôtel Solvay in Brussels is an amazing realization of the Art Nouveau vision. It was designed and built by Victor Horta to serve as a private residence for Armand Solvay, heir to a chemical fortune. It was constructed in 1895 to 1900.

Solvay gave Horta carte blanche to spend whatever he needed to create a truly grand house, and he did not stint.

Horta designed everthing: furniture, carpets, light fittings, tableware.

Even the doorbell.