HIV Travel Ban to End

President Obama, today:

Twenty-two years ago, in a decision rooted in fear rather than fact, the United States instituted a travel ban on entry into the country for people living with HIV/AIDS. Now, we talk about reducing the stigma of this disease -- yet we've treated a visitor living with it as a threat. We lead the world when it comes to helping stem the AIDS pandemic -- yet we are one of only a dozen countries that still bar people from HIV from entering our own country.If we want to be the global leader in combating HIV/AIDS, we need to act like it.

And that's why, on Monday my administration will publish a final rule that eliminates the travel ban effective just after the New Year. Congress and President Bush began this process last year, and they ought to be commended for it. We are finishing the job. It's a step that will encourage people to get tested and get treatment, it's a step that will keep families together, and it's a step that will save lives.

Vanity Fair

To give you an idea of how much time I spend in my car when I have crews in the field, over the past month I have managed to listen to all 30 hours of Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848) on cd. I enjoyed it quite a bit and I am glad that I was never forced to read it as an undergraduate, when I wouldn't have had the time or the background to appreciate it properly.

You know, we like to complain that we live in a very ironic time, and we wonder if our ironic sensibilities keep us from forming powerful attachments or working to make the world better. Let me tell you, no contemporary writer has anything on Thackeray when it comes to irony. The book is full of little asides like, "it was heartwarming to see how often her friends visited her and how well they treated her once she had inherited a fortune." The whole attitude toward society is deeply ironic, whether the subject is social status, the law, the church, the universities, boxing, courting, or even mothers' love for their children. The only things not roundly mocked are private prayer and the bravery of the British army at Waterloo.

"Tenacity" and World War I

I have been looking for an excuse to say this for some time, but now David Brooks has given me one. Brooks says he has been talking to military experts who say that what matters about Afghanistan is not our particular troop level but rather our determination to see the thing through. In particular, they doubt the determination of the Commander-in-Chief:

They are not worried about his policy choices. Their concerns are more fundamental. They are worried about his determination.

These people, who follow the war for a living, who spend their days in military circles both here and in Afghanistan, have no idea if President Obama is committed to this effort. They have no idea if he is willing to stick by his decisions, explain the war to the American people and persevere through good times and bad. . . . They do not know if he possesses tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion. They do not know if he possesses the obstinacy that guided Lincoln and Churchill, and which must guide all war presidents to some degree.

You see this argument a lot these days. We have to persevere. We have to follow through on our commitments. We have to show our allies that they can trust us. We can't cut and run.

Well, maybe, but whenever you hear this kind of argument, you have to remember that arguments like this are the reason World War I was fought. There wasn't any particular issue at stake in the Great War, but all sides felt that they had to stick to their agreements and back up their words with deeds and generally show that they were tough and serious and meant what they said. Millions of dead men later, with Europe in ruins, they had proved their point. They were serious, and they followed through.

But for what? Before we get our backs up about toughness and determination and following through, shouldn't we have something worth fighting for? Some goal worth achieving that we can actually achieve? Because if not, determination is just the route to the Somme and Verdun.

* * *

Update: Amy Davidson's comment on Brooks' essay was, "babbling about imposing one’s will, as if war were a matter of Ray Lewis making a goal line stand, does not tell us anything about what, exactly, we’re doing in Afghanistan."

Gettysburg

When the South seceded, many Southerners thought the North was not in earnest and would not fight. Almost as soon as the North showed it would fight, some Southerners began to slip into the elegaic melancholy of the Lost Cause. Others believed that though the odds were long against them, the Confederates could still win the war if they fought with enough brilliance and daring. The leading spirits of these aggressive optimists were Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Both generals believed that the side with the fewest men must take the longest chances, and that only boldness could keep the Union armies at bay. For two years their methods worked, and they drove back every assault on the Confederate capital of Richmond.

But though the Union could not advance in Virginia, none of Lee's and Jackson's victories seemed to bring the war any closer to the end. Their most brilliant victory, at Chancellorsville in May, 1863, is still taught in military academies but drove the Northerners back only five miles, and the loss of Stonewall Jackson might have mattered more than any battle. Meanwhile the Union was slowly conquering the Confederate west. Searching for some way to win the war, rather than just prolong it, Lee decided on an invasion of the north. A great victory on Union soil, along with the seizure of Philadelphia or Washington, might, he reasoned, have an effect on northern morale that none of his Virginia victories had. So he led his men into Pennsylvania, the Union troops followed, and the two armies blundered into each other at Gettysburg.

For two days, the fighting went well for the Confederates. They drove the Union forces back, breaking their lines several times. But by 1863 there were so many experienced officers and veteran regiments on both sides that there were no easy victories. Every time their position was threatened, Union officers did what was necessary to repair the damage, acting without waiting for orders. Every Confederate thrust was countered, every breakthrough contained. Every act of Confederate gallantry was matched by one from Union men. Both sides suffered frightful casualties, but at the end of two days the Union army remained unbeaten, still in a strong position. And while the Confederate army shrank with every passing hour, steadily arriving reinforcements swelled the Union force. On the night of that second day, Union commander George Meade called a council of war. His top commanders agreed unanimously that they should remain where they were and receive the attack that Lee was certain to launch the next day. Much is made of the way Lee anticipated the moves of his opponents, but after two years of fighting many Union officers knew Lee as well as he knew them. Meade even guessed where the assault would fall, warning John Gibbon that he would be attacked in the morning. Lee, Meade guessed, would use the same design as Marlborough at Blenheim and Napoleon at Marengo; after wearing down his enemy with repeated assaults on their flanks, he would try to break their center with a great charge.

Lee's top subordinate, Longstreet, pleaded with him not to order an attack Longstreet thought was doomed. Lee would not listen. He had not brought his army to Pennsylvania to take it meekly back home. He needed to win a dramatic victory, and he knew he would not win one without taking great risks. So he arrayed the 12,000 men he had available and, after a great artillery bombardment, sent them forward across a mile of open land to the center of the Union line. Seeing them come, Union artillerymen cheered and brought their guns to bear. The Union infantry waiting behind stone walls on Cemetery Ridge loaded their muskets and waited. Some were awestruck by the grand attack, but the more experienced men knew they were being handed a chance to get their revenge for many past defeats. As the Confederates came near, they took aim and fired. Along most of the wall the fire was so intense that the Confederates never got within 50 yards. In one spot called The Angle the men of Picket's Division reached the wall and broke though, and for a few minutes they held their ground at the crest of the ridge, until Union reinforcements arrived and drove them back. A few of them wrote later that they could see masses of stragglers along the road behind the Union front line and knew that with a few more men they could have broken through and won the day. But they were mistaken. The men on the Taneytown Road were not stragglers, but a reserve of 13,000 men and 40 guns that Meade had assembled to seal any break in the line. Meade had so many men that he could defend all his lines and still keep in reserve a force bigger than Lee could muster to attack him. The Confederates retreated to their lines, leaving more than a thousand dead men on the field and another three thousand as prisoners in Union hands.

Gettysburg was not a decisive battle. Lee took his army back to Virginia, Meade followed, and they spent the rest of 1863 in pretty much the same positions they had occupied when the year began. What Gettysburg did was to show, to anyone who still believed otherwise, that Southern brilliance and daring would not be enough to win the war. The Union had found ways of countering Lee and his officers. The war, Gettysburg confirmed, would be won by the weight of men and money. That meant that it was only a matter of time before the Southern armies were crushed, leaving the Confederates to either surrender or head for the hills and fight on as guerrillas.

Oh, yes, I have a little archaeological project at Gettysburg now, which is why I was there today. The top picture shows the view down the Union line on Cemetery Ridge, the second shows Little Round Top from the view of its Confederate attackers, third is the view from the Union line across the field of Picket's Charge, and the last picture shows a red-tailed hawk sitting on a sculpted eagle in the Wheat Field.

There's One in Every Neighborhood

Most of the decorated houses in Georgetown look like this. Unfortunately, there are always a few scapegraces who don't understand the obligations that go with being rich and genteel. What's wrong with these peasants?

The Dancing Plague

I just finished an interesting book, The Dancing Plague by John Waller. (Sourcebooks 2009) It tells the story of an epidemic of uncontrollable, trance-like dancing in Strasbourg in the summer of 1518. In a year of bad harvests, widespread hunger, disease, and a failed peasant uprising in the next district, an ordinary woman of Strasbourg began to dance. Her name was Frau Troffea. Crowds gathered to watch her pitiable dancing, which went on until she collapsed from exhaustion and resumed again as soon as she had rested and had some water. Soon others joined in. The city council was rather enlightened -- Sebastian Brandt, author of The Ship of Fools, was one of their advisers -- and instead of suspecting witchcraft they called in the town's doctors. The doctors diagnosed the dancers with overheated blood in the brain and recommended that they be encouraged to dance until they cured themselves. The town set aside an area for the dancers and even provided musicians. But this only caused the plague to spread faster, until as many as 400 were afflicted. A few died, probably victims of the same kind of exhaustion that occasionally overtakes ecstatic dancers at raves. The city council changed course and began sending the dancers to a shrine of St. Vitus in a mountain grotto 30 miles from Strasbourg. (We don't know how St. Vitus, a late Roman martyr, came to be associated with dancing, but the connection endured for centuries.) Many of the dancers were cured by the pilgrimage, and the plague gradually subsided.

The thing is, that's about everything we know about the outbreak. The story would have made a great article for the New Yorker. Stretched out to 220 pages it is repetitive and full of background stuff that isn’t particularly relevant. So while it is an interesting book, it isn't a great one.

The one really interesting addition to the basic story is the last chapter, which is a survey of contagious, hysterical reactions in the anthropological and medical literature. The Strasbourg dancers were in some kind of trance or fugue state; contemporaries observed that while there were fakers, they were easily detected because they simply could not keep dancing as long or with as much intensity as the victims of the plague. And there have been other cases of such outbreaks, including a well-documented one on Madagascar in the 1860s. I was especially struck by the observation that the symptoms of hysterical or psychosomatic outbreaks have changed over time. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, people used to dance uncontrollably, or at least jerk and foam, or go mute. Now the symptoms almost always imitate medical conditions. A lot of shellshocked soldiers in WW I developed heart murmurs. As the dominant model of severe medical crises shifted from curse or possession to disease, the symptoms of the deranged shifted with it:

Perhaps the most salient development in the modern history of hysteria has been a more general shift away from dramatic motor symptoms during the twentieth century. . . .Mutisms, convulsions, paralyses, altered states, and sensory deficits due to anxiety seem to be less common today than in any time over recorded history. This trend was perceptible even during the First World War, as military hospitals were deluged with men suffering from an almost certainly nervous condition dubbed “Disordered Action of the Heart” that involved chest pains, giddiness, and palpitations. During the Second World War, there were even fewer cases of the flamboyant hysterias of the Victorian era. Today, severe stress is far more likely to be express in a form psychiatrists call “somatoform disorder,” involving psychogenic pain (often headaches and stomach or bowel discomfort), fatigue, dizziness, or a general sense of malaise. Research in rural Indian provides strong evidence for this movement toward the less over somatoform disorder. In two well-studied Indian villages, rates of conversion disorder fell significantly between 1972 and 1987. Far more people now complain of pain and fatigue than motor paralysis or sensory loss. This shift has been attributed to a general increase in the mental health of women due to improved access to schools and, just as importantly, education having reduced “public credulity.”

As normal behavior changes, so does mental illness.

Angry Atheists

Here's an NPR Story titled "A Bitter Rift Divides Atheists." The title strikes me as overblown, but there is tension between your Christopher Hitchens (Religion is "sinister, dangerous and ridiculous. . . . I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt, and I claim that right") types, and people who think that kind of rhetoric accomplishes nothing.

I have personally never seen that anything is gained by insulting people. To me the way to advance reason in public life is to live justly and morally while being honest about what I believe. Most people who hate atheism don't do so because they are afraid of secular ideas, they do so because they believe atheism leads inevitably to immorality. Screaming at them won't change their minds. Insults are not arguments, they just make the world a meaner, less friendly place.

Felony Torture

Via Andrew Sullivan, a little news item from California:

The couple, Daniel Weston and Mary Ann Parmelee, and three other people are accused of luring their two victims to an office where the men were tied up, held for hours and beaten, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney said. . . .

Each count of felony torture, defined as inflicting "great bodily injury" for the purpose of "revenge, extortion, persuasion and for a sadistic purpose," carries a maximum penalty of life in prison. Defense lawyers were not immediately available for comment.

So a civilian can get life in prison for doing things not one percent as heinous as things our former administration did to people we are now releasing from Guantanamo because there is no evidence for holding them.

Curious Things One Didn't Know

Naked mole rats don't get cancer.

Color Blindness

I am red-green color blind. That is, I fail those tests they give you with the numbers concealed in fields of differently-colored spots. But I have no trouble seeing red and green.

I think a better name for my condition would be "color insensitivity." I can see bold blocks of red and green just fine, and I have no trouble recognizing red lights. I have trouble with murky shades, and I would never employ myself as a color consultant, but generally I get along fine. My one practical issue is that I have trouble telling a green light from a white light at night, so it sometimes happens to me that something I took for a street lamp will suddenly turn yellow.

To me the most interesting thing about my color blindness is that it seems to manifest most often, not as being unable to see colors, but as being unaware of them. Once somebody tells me what the number is on one of those test pages, I can see it, and I mean really see it. If I forget what it is, I can't see it any more. I can scan across a green field and not see any of the bright orange surveying flags hiding there, but if one is pointed out to me it leaps into my consciousness. I remember once walking in a field with a friend who observed, "look how red those willows are." I had been unaware until that moment of anything red, and when I looked up at the line of little willow trees by the edge of the pond, they looked at first green. But then some perceptual shift happened, and I saw how red they were.

All of this makes me think that my condition is a glitch in the perceptual software in my brain, not a problem with my eyes. I wonder if other people see as I do, but isn't that one of the great imponderable questions?

What is Music?

After 75 years or so in which the most respected academic composers have been writing "music" that nobody likes and denouncing their critics as bourgeois pedants, we are still left with the question of what music is and whether there is some legitimate sense in which Beethoven is "better" than Pierre Boulez.

The latest attacks on modern music have come, not from conservative critics, but from neurologists. It seems that it is pretty much impossible to define music, but we all know it when we hear it. The questions is, why do we know it when we hear it? Is it just because we are culturally conditioned to recognize it? Apparently not, because even six-month-old babies respond more to music with a traditional melody than to atonal, arhythmic noise. Neuro-musicologists are now asserting that we respond to music because it matches up to certain strongly innate patterns in our brains. Obviously there is a great deal of flexibility in this mechanism, but the latest thinking is that it does exclude a vast universe of sounds that are not melodic or rhythmic enough to resonate with our brains. Music that doesn't match up with what our brains expect may be exciting to theoretically-minded musical rebels who are mainly looking to like something that pedants like me don't get, but it will never have wide appeal.

Philip Ball has an interesting essay on the topic here. I also like his approach to reviewing a book he dislikes, which is to completely ignore the book and just say what he thinks about the topic.

A Resignation over Afghanistan

Matthew Hoh, a State Department official and former Marine, has resigned from his post in Afghanistan, saying that our presence there is only fueling the insurgency we say we have come to fight. According to Hoh, whose resignation letter you can read here,

The Pashtun insurgency, which is composed of multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups, is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions, and religion by internal and external enemies. . . . I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul. The United States military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency.

From the Washington Post:

"I'm not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love," Hoh said. Although he said his time in Zabul was the "second-best job I've ever had," his dominant experience is from the Marines, where many of his closest friends still serve. . . . But many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there -- a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. . . .

Hoh was assigned to research the response to a question asked by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during an April visit. Mullen wanted to know why the U.S. military had been operating for years in the Korengal Valley, an isolated spot near Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan where a number of Americans had been killed. Hoh concluded that there was no good reason. The people of Korengal didn't want them; the insurgency appeared to have arrived in strength only after the Americans did, and the battle between the two forces had achieved only a bloody stalemate.

Korengal and other areas, he said, taught him "how localized the insurgency was. I didn't realize that a group in this valley here has no connection with an insurgent group two kilometers away." Hundreds, maybe thousands, of groups across Afghanistan, he decided, had few ideological ties to the Taliban but took its money to fight the foreign intruders and maintain their own local power bases.

From what I have read, it seems that pressure on Obama to extend the mission is growing, both from in the US military and from some of our allies. I would be very surprised if Obama doesn't go along with these "experts" and send more troops. But it is still the wrong thing to do.

The comment which sheds most light on what is happening in Afghanistan was made by an ordinary Confederate soldier in 1863. Asked by his Yankee captors why he, a poor man with no slaves, was fighting in the war, he said, "I'm fightin' because you're down here."

Glass Microbiology

e. coli, one of a series of microbe sculptures by Luke Jerram. More here. Article on Jerram's work here.

I think these are very striking, but I wonder who would display one in his living room. Perhaps a pharmaceutical company might buy one and put it in the lobby?

The Blind Can See

From Science Daily:

Born with a retinal disease that made him legally blind, and would eventually leave him totally sightless, the nine-year-old boy used to sit in the back of the classroom, relying on the large print on an electronic screen and assisted by teacher aides. Now, after a single injection of genes that produce light-sensitive pigments in the back of his eye, he sits in front with classmates and participates in class without extra help. In the playground, he joins his classmates in playing his first game of softball.

This treatment represents the next step toward medical science's goal of using gene therapy to cure disease. Extending a preliminary study published last year on three young adults, the full study reports successful, sustained results that showed notable improvement in children with congenital blindness.

The study, conducted by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Center for Cellular and Molecular Therapeutics at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, used gene therapy to safely improve vision in five children and seven adults with Leber's congenital amaurosis (LCA). The greatest improvements occurred in the children, all of whom are now able to navigate a low-light obstacle course -- one result that the researchers call "spectacular."

A Perfect Day

It doesn't get any nicer than this. The fall colors are gorgeous, the sky is blue, the temperature perfect for planting bulbs, which is what I just finished doing.

Animal Pancakes

An old Bedell family tradition.

Ben wasn't impressed with that dragon. He said, "Wow, you're not very good at this any more."

Me: "What do you mean?"

Ben: "You know, sometimes you were good at something in the past, but when you get older you lose it."

Fall

Awesomely Bad Similes

Via Bundle Brent, a collection of bad similes purportedly written by high school students. I doubt these were all really written by high school students, but wherever they came from, they are great fun.

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances, like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E.Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

8 The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

10 McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Toronto at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Barrie at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighbourhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

24. It was a Canadian tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

Dark Matter Gets Weirder

We think we understand gravity pretty well. So astronomers think they can look at a galaxy, make measurements of its size, shape, and rate of spin, and then calculate how much mass it has. The problem is, that calculated mass is generally about 20 times the mass of the stars we can actually see. The rest is called "dark matter," which is a cute way of saying "we have no idea." Some of the dark matter may be black holes, but the calculations show that most of it has to be spread out over the entire galaxy in a very even way. So dark matter remains a mystery.

A new set of calculations about the effects of dark matter, which I won't attempt to explain, makes the behavior of dark matter even weirder. It seems to act in some sort of exact correspondence with the matter we can see. But if dark matter is some sort of stuff, why is that stuff distributed in exactly the same way as the visible matter? It makes no sense.

I would say that these new results support the notion that dark matter is not a thing, but some sort of force generated by regular matter, or, even more likely, a sign that we really don't understand gravity as well as we think.

Their Country

Pat Buchanan must have decided that his public profile was getting a little low, so he launched a cry for attention in the form of an outrageous essay on "Traditional Americans" at WorldNetDaily.

Buchanan is useful because he is rational enough to have what one might call a political position and has sufficient grasp of the language to explain it, while being simultaneously crazy enough to empathize with nutjob protesters who think Obama it trying to turn America into North Korea.

He says things like,

In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates.

They, of course, are conservative white men, or, as Buchanan prefers to call them, "traditional Americans." You can think this passage is a silly amalgam of unrelated half-truths, but it is, I think, what millions of Americans believe. If you can't get your mind around this viewpoint, you can't understand American politics, and you will have hard time competing for the votes of the very many people who are at least a little sympathetic to this rant.

To me the most glaring folly of Buchanan's view is the way he puts corporate bigwigs and assembly line workers into the same category (traditional Americans), ignoring the obvious difference in their interests. He writes the labor movement out of his American history. But he is dead on about the ever-falling status of conservative white men in America. The line from this essay that has gotten the most attention is,

America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.

This falls into the category of "offensive but nonetheless true." America did used to belong to conservative white men, and theyare are losing influence. A majority of white men voted for Bob Dole over Bill Clinton and John McCain over Barack Obama, but it didn't matter. They no longer get to decide, as they did for 175 years, who will lead the country. Japanese-Americans and Indian-Americans are richer than whites are, because they have more fully embraced the new technologies that now generate so much of our wealth. I think we are on the verge of recognizing gay marriage and otherwise accepting gay people as full citizens, despite the fulminations of conservative leaders and the distaste of "traditional Americans."

None of which is to say that conservative white men don't still have enormous influence in America, and don't rank in the general scheme of things above lots of other groups. But their day is passing. Of course they don't like it. Who does like being outvoted, or being told that his beliefs are old-fashioned and no longer relevant?

But, hey, too bad.

The world changes, and those who cling to the past get left behind. If there are old things you think are important, work to preserve them, and live them in your own way. But leave the rest of us alone to enjoy the wondrous prospect of a future that is more equal, more free, and more open to the ideas and actions of all people, traditional or otherwise.

Treasures of Afghantistan

The published catalog of the last year's blockbuster exhibit -- "Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul" -- is a trove of wonders. This is the material that the curators of the National Museum hid when then Taliban came to Kabul and kept safe through the American invasion; it has been touring the world to raise money for restoration of the museum.

My favorite objects in the collection come from Tilya Tepe, a Russian rendering of an Uzbek name meaning "Hill of Gold."Here in 1978 Russian archaeologists excavated a group of seven tombs dating to the first or second century AD. These were the princes and princesses of some nomad tribe. The spectacular finds show that the art of these nomads was a mixture of classical western, Chinese, Indian, and central Asian styles, brilliant in its synchretism. These pictures show a pendant (above) that depicts the ancient "master of dragons" motif, interpreted in a classical style, and a gold-crowned woman emerging from the ground (below).

At Least the Russians did Worse

Matt Yglesias reviews Gregory Feifer’s The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan:

You read something like this and you really are struck by all the parallels to our current predicament. But at the same time you’re also really struck by the extent to which the situations tend to be parallel, but not at all the same in terms of their quantity. The Soviets, like the Americans, had some trouble understanding Afghan situations on their own terms in part because the Soviet government (like the American government) understood its role in the world in grandiose, highly ideological, propagandistic terms. But while the shape of the problem was comparable, the extent of it really isn’t. The US isn’t even close to being as ideological or propagandistic as the Soviet one. And it’s like this down the list. The Pakistan border situation is a problem for us, but was a disaster for them. The mujahedeen ideological coalition was broader than the one we’re facing, they were better-funded than the people we’re facing. . . .

The one doubts-raising parallel is that the Soviets put almost laughably little thought into why this was important before they invaded. They never asked pro-Soviet forces in Afghanistan to mount a coup, and there was no real reason to think that the coup failing would damage their interests in any way. The invasion became a disaster not so much because the Soviets weren’t able to succeed in a satisfactory way, but because keeping the war up was so costly in times of money, personnel, attention, prestige, etc. while the US countermeasures were very cheap. Which is to say that something can be doable and also not necessarily be worth doing. But a lot of the debate has focused on whether or not the kind of mission General McChrystal has proposed is even possible, and I think the Soviet experience should increase, rather than decrease, our confidence that it is.

In particular, it’s hard to capture the full scope of this in the blog post, but the Soviet war in the early phases was dominated by really nutty operational conduct. For example, they opened their intervention on behalf of the pro-Soviet Afghan government by shooting the leader of the pro-Soviet Afghan government and replacing him and everyone in his regime by leaders of a rival Communist faction. Obviously, that set a bad tone for the whole thing, but somehow they convinced themselves that this move would be welcomed by the local population. I could go on.

Thoughtful, longer review by Ahmed Rashid here.

A Day Outside

I went down to Marine Corps Base Quantico today for the kickoff meeting for a new project, and a tour of the project area. It was a perfect day. I took this picture of maple trees while waiting outside the front gate, which got me questioned by two polite young Marines, who were afraid I was taking pictures of their security measures. The hog-nosed snake was playing in the dust near one of our project areas.

Hoist on My Own Petard

I often seize control of the music playing in the kitchen and dining room by asserting the privilege of the cook. Now my eldest son is baking cookies and listening to Megadeath.

:-(

Captive of the Taliban

From David Rohde's account of his 7 months as a Taliban hostage:

For the next several nights, a stream of Haqqani commanders overflowing with hatred for the United States and Israel visited us, unleashing blistering critiques that would continue throughout our captivity.

Some of their comments were factual. They said large numbers of civilians had been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Palestinian territories in aerial bombings. Muslim prisoners had been physically abused and sexually humiliated in Iraq. Scores of men had been detained in Cuba and Afghanistan for up to seven years without charges.

To Americans, these episodes were aberrations. To my captors, they were proof that the United States was a hypocritical and duplicitous power that flouted international law.

When I told them I was an innocent civilian who should be released, they responded that the United States had held and tortured Muslims in secret detention centers for years. Commanders said they themselves had been imprisoned, their families ignorant of their fate. Why, they asked, should they treat me differently?

Other accusations were paranoid and delusional. Seven years after 9/11, they continued to insist that the attacks were hatched by American and Israeli intelligence agencies to create a pretext for the United States to enslave the Muslim world. They said the United States was forcibly converting vast numbers of Muslims to Christianity. American and NATO soldiers, they believed, were making Afghan women work as prostitutes on military bases.

Their hatred for the United States seemed boundless.

I realize that many Muslims are going to hate the United States for the foreseeable future no matter what we do, but maybe as a first step toward solving the problem we could stop killing Muslims with bombs. It seems worth a try.

Pandora

Interesting long NY Times piece on Pandora. The premise of Pandora is that they can take apart the songs you like, figure out what you like about them, and then tell you about other music you might like. This raises the question of whether people actually like music because of how it sounds, rather than because it is cool in their social circle or reminds them of a certain point in their lives:

Pandora’s approach more or less ignores the crowd. It is indifferent to the possibility that any given piece of music in its system might become a hit. The idea is to figure out what you like, not what a market might like. More interesting, the idea is that the taste of your cool friends, your peers, the traditional music critics, big-label talent scouts and the latest influential music blog are all equally irrelevant. That’s all cultural information, not musical information. And theoretically at least, Pandora’s approach distances music-liking from the cultural information that generally attaches to it.

Which raises interesting questions. Do you really love listening to the latest Jack White project? Do you really hate the sound of Britney Spears? Or are your music-consumption habits, in fact, not merely guided but partly shaped by the cultural information that Pandora largely screens out — like what’s considered awesome (or insufferable) by your peers, or by music tastemakers, or by anybody else? Is it really possible to separate musical taste from such social factors, online or off, and make it purely about the raw stuff of the music itself?

I am skeptical. Like a lot of people I know, I listen to many different kinds of music, depending on my mood. There are certain sounds I like and dislike, but toward most genres I am ambivalent. I like some but dislike others. For example, I like several Michael Jackson songs, but don't care for most music that sounds vaguely like Michael Jackson. There are quite a few bands from which I like only a single song; the only song I like by Nickel Creek is "When in Rome," and it still bugs me that I spent $18 to buy a whole cd of their music. And what could be more like one Nickel Creek song than another Nickel Creek song? So I have my doubts about whether these algorithms can ever pick up on the subtlety of musical taste.

And, in practice, my family's experiences with Pandora have so far been uninspiring. My eldest son says that after he carefully told it a long list of songs he likes, it played him only songs he already knew and songs he didn't like.

On the other hand, it is a terrific idea, and I hope it eventually works well enough to point me toward beautiful music I don't already know.

Where the Wild Things Are, Movie Version

I took my three youngest children to see Where the Wild Things Are yesterday.

I thought it was ok. There were some very cute scenes, some wonderful scenery, and some nice moments, but there were also dreary parts. I disliked the opening sequence shot in Max's real world house, where his overworked single mother was struggling with the balance thing and looking really pained and tired and making me feel like I had seen this in twenty movies before, and really Max's acting out was nothing that any experienced parent would have batted an eye at. Shouldn't a kid who is supposed to embody uncontrolled anger do something really bad?

Much more explicitly than in the book, the movie is about strong emotion and the troubles it brings. The wild things are basically big, emotionally troubled kids, who only forget their troubles when having the rowdiest fun, and as the movie shows, rowdy fun sometimes leads to more troubles. The combination of puppetry and digital effects worked very well, and I liked the wild things just fine. The main delight of the movie was watching them have fun together in their beautiful home, and the main problem was exactly what you would expect: in the book nothing happens in the land of the wild things but one wild rumpus, and the movie makers obviously had trouble figuring out what else do to.

I found the ending very interesting. Max seems to have solved his own troubles, for now, but he leaves the wild things much as he found them, fighting and sulking. One tells him, as he leaves, that he is the first king they didn't end up eating. I suppose that implies that while Max has mastered his emotional turmoil, others don't, and in the end are consumed by their wild things. I liked it that the movie makers didn't conjure some pat happy ending, but it did feel rather incomplete.

Clara, who is four, didn't have much reaction to the movie at all. Ben, who is nearly seven, liked it a lot. He squirmed a little during the scariest parts, but he had no real trouble, and he is not especially brave, so I think worries that the movie is too scary are overblown. He said that the end was the saddest thing he had ever seen -- he wanted Max to stay in the land of the wild things forever. The one who really loved the movie was my 12-year-old son Thomas. He loves the book, and he is exactly the kind of child the story is about, a rowdy boy who has trouble with his emotions. He came out raving about how good the movie was.

It's a Leonardo, but is it any good?

From Time:

The 13-by-9-inch portrait, which has now been dubbed La Bella Principessa, is a delicate profile of a young aristocratic Milanese woman, drawn with pen, chalk and ink on an animal skin known as vellum. It was bought two years ago by an anonymous Swiss collector at the Ganz Gallery in New York for about $19,000. Experts now put the possible value of the artwork at upwards of $150 million.

The identification seems fairly sound. Some experts already thought it was a Leonardo based on the style, and this has now been confirmed by infrared photography, radiocarbon dating, and the discovery of a fingerprint very similar to one on a confirmed Leonardo.

But why is this rather insipid thing worth $150 million? I mean, it's cool to find an unknown Leonardo, but shouldn't a painting's value have something to do with how good a painting it is? This strikes me as quite nice, but there are hundreds of Renaissance portraits more beautiful and exciting than this one.

Vampire Killing Kits?

There is stuff all over the net about nineteenth-century vampire killing kits, but Urban Legends isn't buying it.

As they report, the documentation on the website of Sotheby's auction house is equivocal:

Professor Ernst Blomberg reportedly assembled his kits in the nineteenth century. Many experts, however, believe that his kits were assembled in the early twentieth century in response to the interest in vampires sparked by the popularity of Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' published in 1897.

I like the second explanation. Vampires just weren't a big part of the western European imagination until after Stoker's best seller. Yes, people had heard of them, there were some obscure books, and there were even scattered legends about corpses that walked and had to be dug up and burned. But not enough to trigger the level of interest shown in these kits.

Grab a Mop

At a Democratic fundraiser last night, Obama responded to Republican criticism of his efforts:

Another way of putting it is when, you know, I'm busy and Nancy busy with our mop cleaning up somebody else's mess --- we don't want somebody sitting back saying, you're not holding the mop the right way. (Applause.) Why don't you grab a mop, why don't you help clean up. (Applause.) You're not mopping fast enough. (Laughter.) That's a socialist mop. (Laughter and applause.) Grab a mop -- let's get to work.