Royston Cave and the Templar Obsession

In Royston 40 miles north of London, where the ancient Icknield Way once crossed the Roman road known as Ermine Street, is a strange feature known as the Royston Cave. This is a human-made, bell-shaped cavern, about 18 feet in diameter and 30 feet high (5m x 9m), the walls of which are covered with rather crude carvings. It was discovered in the 18th century:

In August 1742, the Cheese & Butter Market of Royston was renovated. One of the workmen dug a hole to erect a bank and discovered a buried millstone. Removing the object by digging around the stone, they stumbled upon a shaft, leading downwards into the chalk. A boy was lowered into the cavity by rope, followed by a small man. They reported there was no subterranean network of tunnels; “just” a bell-shaped cavity.

Still, the locals became excited and fuelled by stories of buried treasure, the cavity was dug out (it had been partially filled with earth), until bedrock was reached. Unfortunately, the soil was not analysed or preserved, but is known to have contained human bones and fragments of pottery and a small piece of brass. The only thing they had to show for their efforts were wall carvings – strange carvings.

The carvings are rather rudimentary scratching, without colour; they depict mostly Christian scenes, several depicting the crucifixion. One carving is more sexual in nature, namely that of a female exposing her genitals to the passer-by. Nevertheless, it has been argued it could potentially have a Christian context, namely that it revolved around St Paul on his road to Damascus. Nevertheless, despite their Christian denomination, there are several pagan images, such as sun wheels and detached human heads.

Two dates are carved on the wall, often interpreted as 1347 and 1350. However, they are in Arabic numerals, which were not in common use in 14th century England, and some think the numbers should be read 1547 and 1550. (Despite the confident assertion of Baring-Gould, Arabic numerals were known in medieval England. They were sometimes used to mark off sections of royal court rolls from the early 1300s; I've seen them, and Michael Clanchy told me what they were. But they were not common.) Others think they were carved much later anyway.

In 1852, archaeologist Joseph Beldam investigated the cave, and he produced these drawings of the carvings. As you see by comparison with the photographs, Beldam's drawings are much simplified, but they help you get an idea of what is present. In the central drawing above, on the left, is one of the most famous figures:

One of the most prominent carvings is that of a crowned woman, holding an eight-spoked wheel, which has been interpreted as St Catherine. It would follow the custom that Christian saints are depicted with the instrument of their martyrdom, in her case the wheel. But others have interpreted her as the Queen of the Underworld, Persephone, or the Roman goddess Fortuna, who is known to have held the Wheel of Fortune. The so-called “sun wheels” could therefore be Wheels of Fortune, or could remain linked with the cult of the sun.

The obvious interpretation of the cave is that it is a storage cellar later used as a hermitage or spiritual retreat. But then why was it placed by this famous crossroads? And why was it intentionally closed off by putting a millstone over the entrance? A crossroads is a place of special magical potency in many magical systems, including those of pagan Europe, and a stone cross had been placed at this one by the 11th century. Millstones also had magical and spiritual associations. All sorts of rumors have grown up around the cave, some associated with the Protestant Reformation (monks in hiding from Henry VIII's henchmen), other with the Masons. Most prominent, though, are rumors about the Knights Templar. St. Catherine and St. Christopher, who figure prominently in the carvings, were important to the Templars, and the Templars owned property in Royston. It is said that the Templar symbol of two knights on a single horse is present in the cave, although I have not found a picture of this. It has been said that the carvings at Royston resemble those carved by Templars who were imprisoned in the Chateaux de Chinon, in the Loire Valley, of which I also can't find a picture.

Of course the Templar connection is being played up now, by all that sort of people. One thing the bothers me is the connection made between the possibly pagan imagery in the cave and the Templars. To the extent that we know anything about the spirituality of the Knights Templar (and we know very little), they were completely conventional Christians for their time. They were neither more nor less likely to use symbols derived from pagan antecedents than other Christians, and like other Christians they probably did not even know that some symbols they thought of as Christian had pagan sources. I can see no reason to associate this cave with the Templars, and a half-mad hermit who spent too much time underground seems to me like a better explanation for these carvings.

It is an intriguing mystery, though.

A Year in a Cave

In 1942, as the Nazis were rounding up the Jews of Ukraine for elimination, the Stermer family and some of their relations went underground. Literally. National Geographic printed their extraordinary story back in 2004, but I just discovered it yesterday:

Soon after the fall of the Soviet Union, veteran caver Chris Nicola became one of the first Americans to visit Ukraine's enormous Gypsum Giant cave systems. Popowa Yama, or Priest's Grotto, is 77 miles (124 kilometers) long, the world's tenth longest cave.

Once inside, Nicola marveled at not only the remarkable natural features of the cave but signs of human presence, including walls and old shoes and walls made of stones.

His Ukrainian companions told him that Jews had lived in the cave during World War II. Some local legends told of survivors; others claimed that none were seen again. Either way, that was where the story ended—until Nicola began a ten-year search for the inhabitants of the cave.

He scoured libraries, bookstores, and the Internet for clues to the cave's inhabitants. But it seemed that his search would end in vain—until he received an unexpected e-mail in New York in December of 2002. The writer, Ed Vogel, said that his father-in-law was one of the survivors of Priest's Grotto.

"I was just terrified that I would somehow accidentally delete that message," Nicola said. Instead he responded—and learned that survivor Solomon Wexler, 74, lived only a few miles away in the Bronx. Wexler connected Nicola with friends and fellow survivors, including the Stermer family. The group's story slowly began to come to light.

The Stermers and other families, including Wexler's, first sheltered in a well-known tourist cave, where they were nearly captured but managed to escape into the darkness. Wexler's mother and nine-year-old brother were caught and executed.

The near miss made one thing clear—the group needed a better sanctuary.

Munko Lubudzin, a forester and family friend, had an answer. He told the Stermers about the sinkhole that led to Priest's Grotto. It was a fireplace-size hole at the bottom of a shallow, muddy ravine where farmers threw dead livestock.

Once inside the massive cave, some 38 people were able to evade the Nazis for 344 days, until their liberation by Soviet troops. The cave proved a superior refuge, with clean water sources, separate chambers for cooking and smoke ventilation, little or no flooding, a concealed and difficult entry, and a labyrinth of dark passages. . . .

The cave's temperature today is constant at 50 degrees F (10 degrees C), and the atmosphere is one of near total darkness. "It was so dark you couldn't see a finger in front of your face," Shulim Stermer remembered. He noted that they filled small bottles with kerosene to create lanterns.

The cave was vast, damp, and isolated. But it was also a haven from the horrors that were unfolding on the surface. "When we were inside we felt some security," Shulim Stermer said, "because we knew it would be very hard for Germans or police to come down there, one at a time, feet first."

Their spirits rose as they improved their cave dwelling. "We closed in an area like a tunnel, and we had good covers, beds, pillows, and we slept," Shlomo recalled. "We adjusted and we slept a lot—if you sleep you're not hungry." The group slept some 15 to 20 hours a day or even longer, on elevated, blanketed beds within a closed gallery that kept hypothermia at bay. Incredibly, nobody became seriously ill.

But the cave could not provide all of life's necessities. The group's men had to occasionally emerge, at night, to replenish stores of food and firewood.

They bought grain from a sympathetic friend and ground it with a mill they had constructed in the cave. In season, they took potatoes and other foodstuff from the fields. Their diet consisted largely of soups and dough.

Firewood was perhaps the most dangerous commodity of all. "We'd go out, we had no choice but to go out or to die inside," said Shulim Stermer. "We'd cut 10 or 15 trees and cut them into very short pieces, 4 or 5 feet [about 1.5 meters] long, so that they would fit in the entrance. This was the most dangerous thing, because we had to make so much noise in the night."

The group endured several close calls. In July 1943 they were buried by a group of villagers, who blocked the entrance to seal their fate. The men were able to find a narrow, rocky gap near the blocked entrance, and over three days and nights dug their way out. The ordeal actually helped to fortify the cave's entrance.

One November night several men went out to buy grain from a friend named Semen Sawkie but were followed by Ukrainian police. The last sack of grain stuck in the grotto's narrow entrance—and likely saved all their lives. On the other side, they heard police talking and a hail of bullets fired at the obstructed entrance. But they were not followed down the narrow, single-file opening.

"We closed up that hole and didn't go out for six weeks," Shulim Stermer remembered. "They probably came and looked for us but never saw a sign. We were lucky there."

Police and villagers believed that the Jews were armed and well secured within a maze of passages and secret exits. In fact, they had no second exit from Priest's Grotto. "It helped us," Shlomo Stermer said. "The secret was that nobody had been inside, nobody knew how it was inside."

Perhaps most important of all, they had each other. "I think that saved us, because we stuck together," Shlomo Stermer said. "We didn't [run off separately, with] everyone on their own. Some did that, and one by one they were all eliminated. We stuck together, and thank God, we found the right place and we had some breaks."

Eventually, news of the German withdrawal arrived in the cave via a note in a bottle dropped through the cave opening.

Another Field Project Ends

Today was the last day of our latest field project in Delaware, so I likely won't be going back until next spring or summer. It was a lovely day, too. I will miss this crew; I liked them, everyone worked hard and we all got along. Above, final paperwork at our last test units; below, the stone foundations of a house built around 1800 and a prehistoric spearpoint.

Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan

I just finished listening to Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan (2006), and I liked it. This book made Taleb famous for a while, because it seemed to predict the financial crisis of 2008. Actually Taleb would deny that he predicted anything, in a strict sense, since his main argument in the book is that the future is not predictable. What he did say was that financial crises happen from time to time, that changes in the financial industry (fewer, bigger banks, more global interconnectedness) made it likely that the next crises would be very bad, that such a worldwide crisis might be triggered by the failure of any of the big banks, and that the whole apparatus of "risk management" and "portfolio science" would not help anybody when the crisis came. Since he was right on every one of these points, he earned a hearing for the arguments in this book.

Taleb argues that the future is not predictable because events that are too rare for us to be able to model their probability have a large impact on how things turn out. He calls these events "black swans." He spends most of the book attacking economists and financial gurus whose models discount the possibility of large, rare events. Most models in economics and finance, he says, are based at some level on the bell curve or "normal distribution" of events. In a bell curve world, events far away from the norm are vanishingly rare, and in a large data set they have very little impact on the average. This is a dangerous illusion, says Taleb. In the real world we have no idea what the likelihood of dramatic, rare events might be, and when they do come they are so significant that they overwhelm years or even centuries of normal progress. In the banking crisis of 1982-1983, American banks lost more money than they had earned in the previous century. (This started the chain of events that led to the savings and loan bailout and the mass mergers of American banks.) Because their work is based on a false model of the world, the prescriptions of economists and financial "experts" are useless. Taleb is particularly savage about the Nobel Prize committee, which gives its prizes to economists whose models are so mathematically pristine that they have no relationship whatsoever to reality.

You might think that, well, sure, but nobody takes economists' models seriously enough for them to do any real damage. Not so. In 1982, American banks had models showing that their exposure to Latin American debt was a manageable risk. In 1998, Long Term Capital Management, run by a staff of luminaries that included two Nobel Prize winning economists, was driven into bankruptcy by a Russian financial crisis that lay outside the models they used to "manage" their risk. Without massive intervention by European and American central bankers, this crash might have brought down the world financial system. People who should have learned from this near disaster bet massively on complicated financial instruments, many of them tied to mortgages, and used bell curve-based models to convince themselves that were running essentially no risk. Those models were wrong, and we are paying the price.

Taleb relates this mathematical hubris to an old philosophical quandary, the Problem of Induction. Just because something has happened the same way every day for your whole life does not mean that it will happen that way tomorrow. As David Hume put it, a chicken fed every day by the farmer becomes convinced that this is the universal order of things and is shocked on the day the ax falls. Banks and financial "experts" convince themselves that what has been happening predictably for a few years will continue to happen. The Greek government has been making regular payments on its debt, so it will keep paying. Mortgage-based securities have held their value, so they will keep holding it. Housing prices will keep going up. And so on. When the future turned out to be different from the past, the models failed. The chicken got eaten, and we ended up with a financial crisis and a worldwide recession.

I agree with Taleb about all of this, and with his withering attacks on the professions of academic philosophy and economics. His book suffers from some bad choices in terminology, repetition stemming from poor organization, and too much self-congratulation, but it is a very valuable attack on some of the biggest categories of self-important nonsense in our world. I wish it might have some impact on how we value economists, financial "experts", and other charlatans. But I doubt it.

Slime Molds and Evolution

Great Carl Zimmer piece in the Times about slime molds. These creatures are not related to the molds that ruin your bread. They live in forests and spend most of their lives as independent amoebae:

[slime molds] respond to starvation by rushing together by the thousands into a single blob. The blob stretches out into a slug-shaped mass about one millimeter long (one twenty-fifth of an inch), which then crawls like a worm toward light.

Once it reaches the surface of the soil, the slug undergoes another transformation: Most of the cells turn into a stiff stalk, while the others crawl to the top and form a sticky ball of spores. They stick to the foot of an animal and travel to a hospitable place.

Inside the slug, about 1 percent of the amoebas turn into police. They crawl through the slug in search of infectious bacteria. When the amoebas find a pathogen, they devour it. These sentinels then drop away from the slug, taking the pathogen with it. They then die of the infection, while the slug remains healthy.

When the slug is ready to make a stalk, more amoebas must die so that others can live. They climb on top of one another and transform their insides into bundles of cellulose. Eighty percent of Dictyostelium cells die this way, allowing the survivors to climb up their lifeless bodies and become spores.

Some biologists think this is how multicellular life first appeared. Among other things they wonder why more cells don't try to become spores, and why they sacrifice themselves willingly:

most of the amoebas that form a slug are closely related to one another.

“They’re helping relatives,” Dr. Strassmann said. Even if the slime molds die to form a stalk, many of their genes are passed on to the next generation through their kin.

To help relatives, Dictyostelium needs a way to recognize them. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston recently figured out part of the way the slime molds tell kin from strangers. The amoebas make a pair of proteins on the surface of their cells, which fit snugly together — like “patches of Velcro,” as one researcher, Gad Shaulsky, put it.

Dr. Shaulsky and his colleagues reported in July that if these proteins cannot link to each other, amoebas cannot fuse. “They completely ignore each other,” said Adam Kuspa, another Baylor biologist.

Very cool stuff.

Thought for the Day

I am an experiment on the part of nature, a gamble within the unknown, perhaps for a new purpose, perhaps for nothing, and my only task is to allow this game on the part of the primeval depths to take its course, to feel its will within me and make it wholly mine.

--Hermann Hesse

Can American Housing Change?

Allison Arieff asks:

Is there anything made in America that’s less innovative than the single-family home? . . . [houses] continue to be built the same way they have for over a century, and usually not as well. Walls and windows are thin, materials cheap, design (and I use the term loosely) not well-considered. The building process is a protracted affair, taking far too long and creating embarrassing amounts of building waste (over 50 percent of all waste produced in the United States, in fact).

These are good questions. Housing is subject to huge crowd effects -- everybody wants a house that everybody else will like, both for social reasons and so they will be able to sell it easily. Home builders are afraid to do anything the least bit unusual, for fear that the heard will stampede in the other direction. As a result many Americans live in houses that are not well suited for them, and builders keep doing things in the same old way even where there are newer and better technologies. Steel frame houses are stronger than wood and cost no more; when assembled from prefabricated units they cost less. But somehow "prefabricated steel frame house" doesn't have the same warm and fuzzy feel of wood, so wood it is. Many people don't want big yards or two-car garages, they just buy them because they think everyone else wants them, or because that's the only kind of house available in the sort of neighborhood they're looking for. And so on.

But forces of stasis are so strong in housing that I don't expect change any time soon.

Firefly, Free Speech, and the Peculiar Logic of University Administrators

University of Wisconsin-Stout professor James Miller put this poster on his office door. Oh, my, the things that followed.

I Hate Willem De Kooning

I try not to be a miserable, complaining, grouchy person, so instead 0f whining here about the millions of things in the world that I dislike, I prefer to post pictures of things I do like. But there seems to be a big retrospective under way of the art of my least favorite "great" artist, Willem de Kooning. Smithsonian Magazine has a feature about this online, with lots of pictures. Every one makes me cringe. The one above, Woman I (1950-1952), pretty much distills everything I hate about 20th-century art. It is ugly to no particular purpose, evokes no emotion but a vague disgust, expresses no idea, connects to no cause or purpose beyond the artist's career, contains no striking or memorable image, and exhibits no special skill at anything beyond uglification. It was during the two years he spent working on this monstrosity that de Kooning said, "Beauty becomes petulant to me. I like the grotesque. It's more joyous."

Here is another in the same vein, Two Women in the Country (1954). I suggest that a better title would have been Two Misshapen Trolls, Clumsily Rendered, in a Hodgepodge Landscape, Supposed to be Profound because it is Nasty.

One might call this genre, "sort of like Picasso but worse." (Woman Sitting, 1943-1944) I know some people like these distorted images, but I have never understood why a painting of a woman in a chair shouldn't actually look like a woman in a chair. Oh, sure, shift of perspective, breaking away form convention, blah, blah. What is gained to compensate for the loss of realism, and the great increase in ugliness?

I find this (Untitled III, 1981) less offensive. It doesn't say anything at all to me, but I prefer the complete absence of message to the ugly shouting (UGLINESS IS BEAUTY! THE GROTESQUE IS THE SUBLIME! IF YOU DON'T SEE THIS, YOU ARE A PHILISTINE WHO CAN'T UNDERSTAND THE POWER OF MY ARTISTIC VISION!!! GO BACK TO YOUR AVERAGE SUBURBAN HOUSE AND MOURN YOUR QUIETLY DESPERATE LIFE!!!) of those hideously distorted women. And that pretty yellow color would look nice in the right living room.

And this (Attic, 1949) I actually kind of like. Suggested forms emerge from the lines in an interesting way, but never become too obvious, and the muted black and white scheme keeps the ugliness from grating too much.

But I think I'll be skipping the de Kooning retrospective.

Cannibalism in Colonial Mexico

Mexican archaeologists working at a remote site in the mountains called Cueva del Maguey have uncovered good evidence of cannibalism: about 50 scraped and boiled human bones from a deposit dated to around 1425 AD. Jesuit missionaries of the 16th and 17th centuries described cannibalism among people known as the Xiximes who inhabited this region, but of course many historians have dismissed that as propaganda. The new evidence suggests the Jesuits were right:

For the Xiximes, the planting-and-sowing cycle was intertwined with a cycle of cannibalism and bone rituals. After each corn harvest, Xiximes warriors were deployed to hunt for enemies—and their flesh.

Most of the time the Xiximes would prey on lone men from other villages working in the fields. Other times, the Xiximes would engage small groups in forest battles, according to the historical record.

The warriors would bring the dead victims back to the village, where Xiximes would rip the bodies apart at the joints, taking care not to break the bones. In cases when carrying a whole body was impractical, the head and hands would be removed and brought back to the village.

Body parts were cooked in pans until the bones emerged clean. The flesh was then cooked with beans and corn and eaten in a type of soup—part of an all-night village ritual, complete with singing and dancing, according to missionaries' reports.

After the feast, the bones were stored for months in treasure houses. Then, in the run-up to the annual planting season, the Xiximes would hang the bones from roofs and trees—enticements to the spirits to help the crops along.

"For these practices," Punzo said, "they were called by Jesuits the wildest and most barbarian people of the New World."

Today in the European Crisis

The Greek government is having trouble complying with demands for information from the European Union because all the workers in its National Statistical Bureau are on strike.

I realize nobody cares what American archaeologists think about the finances of the EU, but I am going to say my piece anyway. The Euro never made sense as an economic measure. It made sense only as a way to force greater integration of the EU. Seventeen independent countries can't share one currency. The architects of the Euro probably hoped they would get more time for everyone to adjust to the idea of being European citizens before they had to confront a crisis like this one. But life isn't like that. Europe faces a choice: integrate their fiscal policies and issue common bonds, which pretty much means giving up national independence, or dissolve the Euro. Since most European voters don't seem to want to give up national independence, they should dissolve the Euro. They would mean a year of two of chaos, but if they want national independence the only alternative is this unending crisis, from which they will never emerge.

Quilts

From the "Infinite Variety" show of quilts belonging to Joanna Rose, at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. More pictures here. Rose says she bought most of the quilts at yard sales or along the side of the road.

A Riot of Cosmos

Today.

And You Thought I was Kidding about the Deer

This was taken a block from my house at 2 PM this afternoon. This herd walked calmly across the road in front of my car and two others. By the time I got my phone camera out and ready they were all standing in the nearby yard.

Art, Money, and Snobbery in Bentonville: The Crystal Bridges Museum

Lots of catty ugliness in art circles about the continent's newest major art museum, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Endowed by Walmart heiress Alice Walton, the museum has an impressive collection and a savvy staff. It is controversial because just by its existence it exposes the hypocrisy of the art world. Art -- I mean the kind of art that gets into museums -- is surrounded by all manner of expectations and myths. Many artists and their fans want art to be some sort of social critique or even revolutionary force. Others want it to preserve aristocratic values in a world of democratic philistinism. What it mainly does, though, is decorate the lives of the fabulously wealthy. It provides a way for newly rich business tycoons to ally themselves with the aristocratic tradition, and to feel that they serve a purpose beyond their own self advancement. If you care about art, you have to admit that the super rich do serve this useful function. Art is not an anarchic force, or a leveller, or an engine of social change. As it exists in our society, it does more to legitimate social distinctions than to undermine them.

Modern art is more an ally of capitalism than its enemy, and the only redistribution it promotes is the moving of money from patrons to artists. I have always suspected that some artists are laughing up their sleeves as they do this, and that some of their works are intended as jokes on the rich fools who buy them. But given the appreciation of works by Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Jeff Koons, it seems that the rich fools have had the last laugh.

What, though, about explicitly revolutionary art? Well, who collects such works? Aristocrats and rich businessmen. From the beginning of the revolutionary period at Lexington and Bunker Hill, part of the elite has always been taken up with revolutionary causes, and this is especially true in aesthetic terms. The people most captivated by revolutionary rhetoric have come more from the elite than the masses. It is this segment, of the elite but at some level against themselves, that consumes revolutionary art. What place does the work of, say, Basquiat have in the political discourse? The real masses have never heard of him. So whatever critique his work poses of the established order is comprehensible only to a narrow elite, and pretty much by definition has no revolutionary effect. The attitude of your average creator of museum installations toward really popular art tells you all you need to know about the actual politics of the art world.

Walmart epitomizes much of what the cultural elite hates, in terms of both capitalist exploitation and tackiness. So of course lots of self-important artists are going to snark about a Walmart-funded art museum. In doing so they are only exposing their ignorance of the economic and social position of museum art in our society. Theirs is an elite bastion, and it can only survive with the financial support of people who have a whole lot of money.

I don't much care. The way I appreciate art has little to do with my political instincts; after all, my favorite art was mostly made for warrior aristocrats or priests of bloody religions. Alice Walton's museum has a great collection in a decent building, and I am perfectly happy to appreciate it on that basis. I hope I get to go someday.

Some works from the collection. Top, Thomas Moran, "Valley of the Catawissa in Autumn," 1862. Above, Tom Uttech (1942- ), "Enassamishhinjijweian," 2009.

Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966), "The Lantern Bearers," 1908.

Asher B. Durand (1796-1886), "Kindred Spirits," 1849.

Girlfriends

Clara and her friend Selma at Ben's soccer game today.

Bioluminescent Surf

Southern California, this week. Video here.

Obama's Militarism is Different from Bush's

Matt Yglesias:

Rachel Maddow had a segment last night taking note of the remarkably rapid increase in the pace with which actual al-Qaeda leaders have been killed by US forces since President Obama’s inauguration. It reminded me that there’s a tendency, which I think is somewhat misguided, to take all of Obama’s “hawkish” actions and fold them into a narrative about continuity with Bush administration policies since Bush was also “hawkish.” There are some real continuities, but I think this business is actually an example of discontinuity.

The difference—and I think it’s a big difference—is that the Bush administration took a very ideological view of “the war on terror.” They viewed the United States as broadly in conflict with a vast-yet-hazily-defined array of Muslim Bad Guys such that Saddam Hussein and the government of Iran were somehow part of the same problem as Osama bin Laden. The conceptual alternative to this that Obama offered was to think of al-Qaeda as a specific, narrow thing that ought to be obsessively targeted and destroyed. His team viewed the Iraq War as a catastrophic distraction from that task, and also repeatedly clashed with John McCain over the need to more forcefully disregard Pakistani government views about hitting targets in Pakistan. You see in the rising body count that this all wasn’t just talk. There’s been some kind of meaningful reallocation of national resources away from Bush’s geopolitical vision in favor of a much more literal global effort to identify, locate, and kill members of al-Qaeda.

As with his Afghanistan policy, Obama is doing exactly what he said he would. Liberals may not like the increase in assassinations, or the extra troop deployments to Kabul, but these measures shouldn't come as a surprise.

Faith, Error, and the Death Penalty

The case of Troy Davis, put to death by the state of Georgia despite what looks to me and many others like reasonable doubt, puts us face to face with the awful psychological consequences of being wrong. The harder you look into questions of guilt and innocence, the more you come up against the powerful emotions that surround the possibility of error. Some people will do almost anything to avoid admitting that they did the wrong thing. There seems, for some people, to be nothing worse in life. This horror operates at both the personal and institutional levels. People hate to be wrong themselves and will fight like Tasmanian devils to avoid admitting error. People also hate for the institutions they work for and believe in to be questioned. Rather than focus on getting at the truth, many policemen, prosecutors, and judges act to defend their faith in the judicial system. If re-opening old cases would show that the courts made a mistake, they would rather leave an innocent man in prison. There is a class of person that simply cannot live with uncertainty and must believe absolutely in the rights and wrongs of things. Unfortunately, such people are probably more likely to get into criminal justice careers than those inclined toward skepticism. The result is a system that too often opposes the pursuit of the truth, when that pursuit risks showing that somebody has made an awful mistake. . .

The rest is on the bensozia web site.

The Awakening

One of the most popular sculptures in Washington is J. Seward Johnson's "The Awakening." In 1980 it was installed in East Potomac Park under a temporary license from the National Park Service, as part of an arts festival.

It remained in this "temporary" location for 27 years, drawing amused crowds.

The statue was probably inspired by this 17th-century work, the Bassin d'Encelade by Gaspard Marcy, at Versailles.

Then in 2008 the developers of National Harbor, a hotel/marina/convention center complex just below the Wilson Bridge, were looking for a way to get generate some extra buzz around their grand opening and make themselves look like art lovers. They bought the sculpture from Johnson for $750,000 and paid about that much again to dig up the five separate, cast aluminum pieces and move them to their waterfront, and restore the landscape of East Potomac Park. The Washington Post has a slide show of the move.

The former site of the statue as it looks these days.

And here is the statue in its new home, washed every day by the tide.

I think this is my favorite photo of the sculpture, taken in its former home.

Testing Eye Witness Testimony

Kathryn Schultz:

In 1902, a heated argument between two students in a college classroom turned violent. One of the students pulled a gun on the other, the professor leapt in to try to subdue him, and, in the ensuing chaos, a shot was fired. This was in the days before school shootings were all too common, but even by those bygone standards, this one was particularly unusual: it was fake. The whole thing was choreographed by a professor of criminology at the University Seminary in Berlin named Franz von Liszt. After the putative gunmen was led away, the shaken students were asked to provide individual accounts of what had happened, giving as much detail as possible. Von Liszt then compared their accounts to the actual script of the event, which the actors had followed to the letter.

The results of this study were disturbing then, and they remain so today. The best eyewitnesses got more than twenty-five percent of the facts wrong. The worst erred eighty percent of the time. As another professor who had observed the experiment wrote, “Words were put into the mouths of men who had been silent spectators during the whole short episode; actions were attributed to the chief participants of which not the slightest trace existed; and essential parts of the tragi-comedy were completely eliminated from the memory of a number of witnesses.”

Thousands of experiments done since all show the same thing: eye witnesses cannot be trusted.

Vasily Vereshchagin

Russian artist who traveled extensively in central Asia, India, and the Middle East. Above, Mausoleum of Gur Emir, Samarkand, 1869

Tombs in Samarkand, 1869

At the Fortress -- Let them in, 1871

The Apotheosis of War, 1871

Sudden Attack, 1872

The Doors of Tamerlane, 1872-1873

A Pause During Combat, 1873

Jerusalem, The Kings' Tombs, 1885

One Day, Bahrain Will Come Back to Bite Us

In Bahrain, we keep selling weapons to the Sunni government as they continue their disgusting crackdown on Shiite protesters:

A court in Bahrain sentenced a protester to death on Thursday for killing a police officer in March, and it issued harsh prison terms to medical workers who treated protesters wounded during the months of unrest there this spring, according to the official Bahrain News Agency. The punishments drew strong criticism from rights groups.

The agency reported that eight people it identified as doctors who worked at a central hospital in the capital, Manama, received 15-year sentences. Other medical personnel at the hospital, the Salmaniya Medical Complex, Bahrain’s largest public hospital, were given terms of between 5 and 15 years.

The sentences were the latest sign that the country’s Sunni monarchy would continue to deal severely with those involved in widespread protests this year, mostly held by members of its repressed Shiite majority. Much of that effort has been focused on the doctors and nurses who treated demonstrators.

At the height of the protests, security forces commandeered the Salmaniya hospital and arrested dozens of doctors and nurses. Rights activists have since accused the government of having made systematic efforts to deny medical services to wounded protesters. The international relief organization Doctors Without Borders stopped working in Bahrain last month after its offices were raided.

I know we are short of allies in a region increasingly dominated by Iran, but eventually the government in Bahrain is going to fall. When it does, we are going to regret having supported these thugs. To jail doctors for treating wounded people goes beyond your basic authoritarianism into seriously evil territory.