The Garamantes of the Libyan Desert

The Romans who ruled North Africa had frequent troubles with people they called "Garamantes," who lived in the Sahara Desert but sometimes raided coastal areas in modern Libya. Settlements of these people have long been known along the fringes of the Mediterranean zone, and three towns near the border of the Roman empire have been investigated by archaeologists. It was assumed, though, that these people were limited to the borders of Mediterranean civilization; after all, to the south was only 500 miles of desert waste, so where else could they live?

But the Sahara, as we understand more and more, is a dynamic thing, growing and shrinking across the millennia, and many areas now sandy waste were once grassy savannah. British archaeologists working in southwestern Libya have explored a large group of archaeological sites in what is now an uninhabitable area. The sites were first found from satellite photographs, then explored by vehicle and on foot. The main remains in some areas are the underground tunnels, they used to bring water from oasis springs to their fields. The map at the top shows what was once a thriving oasis community, the former fields in green, fortified farms with black lines showing their mud-brick walls, and a mud brick fort. More than 100 fortified farms have been identified. The photograph above shows one of the forts. These settlements have been dated to between AD 1 and 500, and the investigators believe that they were inhabited by Garamantes:

The findings challenge a view dating back to Roman accounts that the Garamantes consisted of barbaric nomads and troublemakers on the edge of the Roman Empire. "In fact, they were highly civilised, living in large-scale fortified settlements, predominantly as oasis farmers. It was an organised state with towns and villages, a written language and state of the art technologies. The Garamantes were pioneers in establishing oases and opening up Trans-Saharan trade," Professor Mattingly said.

If this is correct, it explains why the Romans were never able to completely subdue the Garamantes. When their towns along the southern fringe of the Mediterranean world were attacked, they probably retreated to desert oases where the Romans would have been hard put to follow them.

This rock painting, in the Libyan desert, is believed to show a chariot of the Garamantes.

Sometimes when I ponder human settlements in what are now barren deserts I feel terribly sad. It would be awful to watch your home turn from oasis to desert. These things seem to happen quickly, in a matter of decades or even years. One year your wells yield enough water for you and your flocks, and the next they do not. I suppose that at first people would tough it out, thinking this was only another temporary drought, but after a while -- three years? five? -- they would not longer be able to sustain themselves, and they would have to move on.

Rodrigo Abd, The Mine

Amazing series of photos by Rodrigo Abd of "The Mine," a giant trash dump in Guatemela City where people search for scrap metal in contaminated water.

After a Death

Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.

One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
through brush where a few leaves hang on.
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names swallowed by the cold.

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.

by Tomas Tranströmer
translated by Robert Bly

Janet Echelman's Gossamer Wonders

Beautiful aerial sculptures by American artist Janet Echelman. Above, "Tusnami," installed in Sydney, Australia, in January 2011. These are made of string and light. Many more photos and videos on the artist's web site.

"Her Secret is Patience," 2009, Phoenix, Arizona.

"1.26", 2010, Denver, Colorado.

"She Changes," 2005, Porto, Portugal.

Aboard the World's Biggest Ship

The Economist's Banyan reports from the bridge of the 400-meter-long Eleonora Maersk, a container ship that is one of the world's biggest vessels:

To make it worth one’s while to ship cigarette-lighters and sparklers most of the way round the world, it is best, of course, to have a ship as big as the Eleonora Maersk. Only with such behemoths can shippers and retailers achieve the economies of scale that are necessary to make the Asia-Europe trade pay. Maersk lines, the world’s biggest container-shipping company, has eight such triple-E class ships—and has just ordered 20 even (slightly) bigger ships from Korean yards. High oil prices are now forcing all the main container-shipping firms to order ever bigger ships. They might be awesomely expensive (Maersk’s new ones will cost almost $200m each), but with fuel costs making up such a large part of their bills, all the shipping lines are looking to reduce the cost per mile per container on the Asia-Europe run. The only feasible way to do that is pile more containers on one ship.

So almost everything about the Eleonora, which was built in the mid-2000s, is quite simply—The Biggest in the World, Ever. It is not just the biggest kind of container ship, but the biggest ship of any sort in service. To move its load through the water, it boasts the largest combustion engine ever built—generating horse power equivalent to 1,000 family-sized cars. The 14-cylinder engine turns the longest propeller shaft (130 metres) ever built, at the end of which is the largest propeller, weighing in at 130 tonnes. Yet so efficient is the engine, says the Danish chief engineer, that cruising at an average of 17 knots the ship consumes just 3 grams of fuel per tonne per nautical mile—which certainly sounds low. This sort of calculation, above all, makes a TV screen made in China affordable in Copenhagen.

Earthquakes in Oklahoma

Oklahoma experienced a magnitude 4.7 earthquake early Saturday, and then a magnitude 5.6 quake (the strongest on record for the state) just before 11 p.m. Since Saturday night the state has felt 10 aftershocks. This is the latest episode in a steady rise in seismic activity that led the USGS to install new monitors in the state last year. Nobody knows why.

Sexual Abuse at Penn State, or, Adults who Choose to Work with Teenagers

Jerry Sandusky, until recently the defensive coach of the mighty Penn State football team and mentor to a string of NFL linebackers, founded an organization called Second Mile to work with at risk youths and led it for 20 years. This noble calling turned out to have a sinister dark side:

The allegations against Sandusky, who started The Second Mile in 1977, range from sexual advances to touching to oral and anal sex. The eight young men testified before a state grand jury that they were in their early teens when some of the abuse occurred; there is evidence even younger children may have been victimized.

What saddens me most about this case is the cloud it and so many other cases have cast over all adults who choose to work with young people. I take it as a given that people often do what they do because they find it erotic. I think a lot of business people get a sexual charge out of wearing expensive suits and taking phone calls in posh offices. I have a professor friend who likes to say that "teaching is seduction." I once heard a chef explain the atmosphere in an elite kitchen by saying, "cooking is sex."

Given the sexual component to so much human activity, it seems inevitable to me that many adults who work with teenagers do so at least partly because they find it erotic. And there is nothing wrong with that, as long as you keep your hands to yourself. If your behavior is correct, the deep seat of your motivations is nobody's business. But whenever it turns out that some trusted person has been molesting his young charges, we start looking dubiously at everyone who chooses to spend his or her time with younger people. It's sad, it breeds suspicion of everyone and everything, and it isn't fair to the legions of adults who do act correctly toward the children placed in their care.

Act Like the Person You Want to Be

The great surrealist artist Salvador Dali was described by his fellow students at the Madrid art academy as "morbidly" shy according to his biographer Ian Gibson. He had a great fear of blushing and his shame about being ashamed drove him into solitude. It was his uncle who gave him the sage advice to become an actor in his relations with the people around him. He instructed him to pretend he was an extrovert and to act like an extrovert with everyone including your closest companions. Dali did just that to disguise his mortification. Every day he went through the motions of being an extrovert and, eventually, he became celebrated as the most extroverted, fearless, uninhibited and gregarious personalities of his time. He became what he pretended to be.

- Michael Michalko

Greece as an Imaginary State

In Greece, the government has given up their notion of holding a referendum on on austerity and Euro membership; it seems they may have floated the idea as a way to force the opposition to join them in endorsing the EU-mandated spending cuts. Greek writer George Zarkadakis has an essay in the Post that takes off from the quashed referendum but then wanders all over without ever taking a clear position on the policies at issue. It is still quite interesting, though. Zarkadakis takes a long view:

The year was 1832, and Greece had just won its independence from the Ottoman Empire. The “Big Powers” of the time — Britain, France and Russia — duly appointed a Bavarian prince as Greece’s first king. His name was Otto. He arrived in his new kingdom with an entourage of German architects, engineers, doctors and soldiers — and set out to reconfigure the country to the romantic ideal of the times. . . .

Athens, at that time a small hamlet of a few goatherds, was inaugurated as the new national capital. The architects from Munich designed and built a royal palace, an academy, a library, a university and all the beautiful neoclassical edifices that contemporary Greek anarchists adorn with graffiti. There was no Sparta in Otto’s kingdom, so a new Sparta was constructed from scratch by the banks of the Eurotas River, where brave Lacedemonians used to take their baths. Modern Greece was thus invented as a backdrop to contemporary European art and imagination, a historical precursor of many Disneylands to come.

I have mentioned before the irritation many Greeks feel when Germans or Frenchmen harass them about protecting the classical archaeological sites that turn up in the way of almost every construction project in the country. Zarkadakis places this irritation in the context of Greece's long domination by foreign powers, who created the country in the first place and regularly interfered in its politics, all the while taking much more interest in relics of the classical past than in the contemporary inhabitants. From 1945 until the 1980s Greece was a pawn in the Cold War, dominated by American-backed generals and then by weak political coalitions. With the collapse of the Soviet Union Greece entered a brief period of greater independence. The political and intellectual elite quickly surrendered that independence to immerse themselves in the European Union; Zarkadakis says they did so because they always felt greater kinship with the pan-European elite than with their own ordinary countrymen:

The intellectuals, mostly foreign-educated and well traveled, dream of a truly westernized Greece through some miracle of economic and social science. When the loan referendum was announced, like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky, most of them opposed it. Greece had to show that it belonged to the European family of nations, whatever that may mean. Rebellion was not to be tolerated, lest the country was kicked out of the euro, the symbol of Greek westernization. In the end, the intellectuals and politicians — with a lot of persuasion from angry European leaders and technocrats — had the referendum quashed. Besides, the invention of fantastical modern Greece demanded that its people, the third division of society, also remained imaginary.

The indifference of European political leaders to the wishes of their voters has come to the fore again and again in the course of ever closer union. The abandonment of the referendum plan means that Greece's citizens will once again have no say in their nation's affairs. The political leaders and the bankers will write the country's budget around a table in Berlin or Paris, and though Greeks protest and riot, nobody will pay much attention.

I am not normally much of a populist, or a nationalist, but this surrender of Greek independence feels like a corrupt back room deal to me, not democracy in action. Perhaps the Greeks brought this on themselves by the selfishness and sense of entitlement that bankrupted their country, but I would say that the bankers are just as guilty, and at the end of the day they will drive their Mercedes home to their comfortable houses, take off their Italian suits, and shed not tears for the travails of a Greece facing a decade of recession. If the European Union can't be made into a more truly democratic project, I think that it will fail, and that there is a real danger that failure will lead to a rebirth of fascism.

Viking Sunstones

The thirteenth-century Hrafns Saga contains the first mention of a mysterious bit of Viking lore called the sunstone:

The weather was thick and stormy... The king looked about and saw no blue sky. Then the king took the sunstone and held it up, and then he saw where [the sun] beamed from the stone.

It was first suggested back in the 1960s that a sunstone might be a piece of Icelandic spar, a transparent form of calcite that polarizes light. One problem with this theory was that nobody had ever found a piece of Icelandic spar on a Viking archaeological site, so there was no evidence that medieval people knew of the stone and its properties. Then in the 1970s a piece of Icelandic spar was found in the wreck of a 16th-century English ship, giving new credence to the idea.

Now a team of intrepid scholars from the University of Rennes have tried to navigate using a piece of Icelandic spar and found that, yes, it really works:

Here, we demonstrate theoretically and experimentally that using the transparent common Iceland spar as a depolarizer, the Vikings could have performed a precise navigation under different conditions. Indeed, when simply rotated, such a birefringent crystal can completely depolarize, at the so-called isotropy point, any partially polarized state of light, allowing us to guess the direction of the Sun. By equalizing the intensities of the ordinary and extraordinary beams at the isotropy point, we show that the Sun direction can be determined easily, thanks to a simple sensitive differential two-image observation. A precision of a few degrees could be reached even under dark crepuscular conditions. The exciting recent discovery of such an Iceland spar in the Alderney Elizabethan ship that sank two centuries before the introduction of the polarization of light in optics may support the use of the calcite crystal for navigation purposes.

It works like this:

Simply rotating the crystal gave a good chance of detecting the sun, the team found. But when the stone was covered with an opaque sheet with a hole at its center, two distinct shadows were created. Rotating the crystal now made one shadow lighter and the other darker, according to their angle to the sun.

They were consistently able to determine the location of the sun to within a few degrees, even when it had dipped below the horizon. I would put the sunstone theory in the "very likely to be true" category -- "confirmed," as the Mythbusters would say -- and the next time I teach about the Vikings I plan to mention it.

The Minoan Bull Leaper

Another fascinating object from the British Museum's History of the World in 100 Objects is this small bronze statue of a Minoan bull leaper. I confess that I never saw this before -- which is somewhat puzzling, given that I have read a stack of books on Minoan Crete and visited the British Museum about five times during the year I lived in London. Perhaps it was on loan elsewhere that year.

According to the museum,

The group is solid cast, in one piece, using the lost wax technique. The arms are not represented, but end in stumps: it is not clear whether this was by design or because the bronze did not flow into the extremities of the mould. Equally, the loss of the lower legs may have been due to a casting fault. . . .

This bronze group was bought in 1921 by Capt. Spencer-Churchill, a noted collector of bronzes whose collection was dispersed after his death in 1964. The entry in his register (no. 218) states that it was: ‘Acquired in Rethymno where it was probably excavated’. It is possible that it was originally deposited at a rural sanctuary in the Rethymnon area, but its findspot is unknown.

It was published by Sir Arthur Evans, excavator of Knossos, in the Journal of Hellenic Studies (see below). He dated it to the Late Minoan I period, around 1600 BC, and compared it to an ivory bull-leaper found at Knossos, now in Heraklion Museum.

Various "experts" have proclaimed that this sort of bull leaping would be impossible. But who knows what people and bulls who trained together for years could have managed, especially if the bulls were specially bred for the job?

The Medieval Churches at Banganarti, Sudan

Scholars have been investigating a group of medieval churches at Banganarti in modern Sudan, on the Nile between the third and fourth cataracts. The sanctuary was a center of healing and pilgrimage dedicated to Raphael, the angel who became in medieval Christianity the patron saint of the blind. Above is a reconstruction of how the Upper Church looked in AD 1100.

Fresco of Saint Damian.

Portrait of a Nubian ruler named King David.

One of the many inscriptions found at the site is in Catalan, written by a man 2000 miles from home. It says, "when Benesec came to pay homage to Raphael."

The man in this sketch is identified as Deif Ali, Arabic for "Ali the Guest." He was probably a Muslim. Since he is depicted as blind, he probably came to pray to Raphael for help with his infirmity.
In the lower church, built around AD 600, are amazing frescoes done in a style more western than Byzantine, suggesting further connections to Europe. These are damned souls in hell.

Hard Work and Moneymaking

Matt Yglesias responds to the same Will Wilkinson column that inspired my post below:

But if I look at America today, what I see undermining any meaningful notion of work ethic is a kind of run-amok ethic of moneymaking. The old Calvinist idea about money, as I understood it, was that hard work, discipline, and prudence were moral virtues. They were also things that are more likely than not to lead to personal prosperity. So prosperity shouldn’t be stigmatized as ignoble, it should be rather seen as something likely to flow from virtuous behavior. But this equation assumes that morally speaking what matters is the hard work, the discipline, and the prudence. Cutting corners, lying, cheating, or stealing to make a quick buck doesn’t fit the bill. Earning a multi-million dollar salary to deliver below-average performance as the CEO of a firm and then take a multi-million dollar golden parachute when you get sacked doesn’t fit the bill. Spending your days and nights dreaming up smart regulatory arbitrage schemes doesn’t fit the bill. In terms of what it says about your personal virtue, if you’re going to earn your keep identifying and exploiting previously unknown loopholes in the legal framework, you may as well just go out and break the law.

Starlings

I love these videos. Starling flocks don't have leaders, they just respond to the birds around them, so these amazing patterns emerge from thousands of individual acting on their own.

The Mechanical Galleon

Perusing the British Museum's History of the World in 100 Objects, I was struck by the inspired choice of this charming toy.

The galleon was made by Hans Schlottheim (1544 - 1625) who produced many mechanical automata for the princes who collected such things:

This mechanical galleon is in fact an elaborate, automated clock. Its mechanism no longer works but originally it would have played music, fired its cannons and trundled across the table at imperial banquets. Clocks like this were important status symbols in the courts of Europe in the 1500s and this clock is based on the great European ships that sailed the oceans during this period.

The figures on the deck are the Holy Roman Emperor and the Seven Electors, the Dukes and Bishops who chose the emperor. When the galleon was made the Holy Roman Emperor was the Hapsburg Rudolf II, and the galleon was an allusion to the Spanish treasure fleets that enriched the Hapsburg family.

The mechanical galleon is an inspired choice because it combines two of the key technologies of the Renaissance: sailing ships and the mechanical clock. It was the ships that made the age of world empires possible, that united the old world with the new, and that launched the modern economy. The caravels, fluyts, galleons and barques were not the first ocean-going ships nor even necessarily the best of their time, but they were good enough and they could be built at reasonable cost, so in their thousands they made Europe the center of a newly united world. It is hard to see how the modern world could have come about without the ships and the skill and daring of the men who sailed them across the stormy oceans.

The effects of the mechanical clock are more subtle but equally profound. These clocks changed our understanding of time and therefore the way we work and live. They created a class of craftsmen who made mechanical objects for a living, and who could then turn their skills to making everything from improved guns to mechanical looms. They launched a fad for ingenuity and invention that, as much as anything else, defines the modern age: other cultures have mostly been satisfied to do things in the old way, but we are constantly looking for some way to do better, or just for some entertaining novelty.

Ours is the global age, the mechanical age, the age of change for its own sake, and this object wonderfully represents all of those things.

Hard Work vs. Luck

Will Wilkinson has an interesting post about the very different ways conservatives and liberals think about wealth and poverty. He summarizes:

Liberals tend to explain both poverty and wealth in terms of luck and the influence of social forces while conservatives tend to explain poverty and wealth in terms of effort and individual initiative.

Absolutely true; my liberal take on the social origins of wealth is here. And this is why, as Wilkinson notes, libertarians usually end up allied with conservatives in American politics, despite their very different personalities:

As long as they stick to complaining about handouts for poor people sitting on their asses and praising rich people working hard to make civilization possible, libertarians and conservatives get along fine.

I would like to insert a few caveats here. My main objection to the conservative notion that wealth comes from hard work is at the top of the pyramid, not the bottom. Think about this: do corporate executives work harder than janitors or coal miners? I submit that they do not. Or, do corporate executives work harder today than they did in 1955, when their salaries were much, much lower? No, they do not. Does anything about the way people work explain the increasing inequality in America, that is, the ever growing ratio between the salaries of CEOs and the wages of factory workers? No, not at all. Inequality is growing because the rich have gotten more shameless and more clever about exploiting their positions to enrich themselves, along with (possibly) some effects of globalization. This insight explains why I support much higher taxes on the very rich, and why I get furious whenever I see people with money congratulating themselves on how hard they work to earn it.

On the other hand I agree that at the bottom income has a lot to do with personal choice and failings. Consider the people you know who are poor, or who have fallen far below the standards of living of their parents, and you will surely see that most of them have serious problems: drugs, alcohol, divorce, poor mental health. Or else they chose to give up middle class life for a shack in the mountains somewhere. I believe that in America reasonably healthy people with normal intelligence can make a decent living if they put their minds to it.

But I still think that the conservative/libertarian critique of the "welfare state" is off base. First, in America we actually spend little money supporting healthy poor people. Conservatives seem to imagine that we spend hundreds of billions supporting lazy layabouts who ought to get off their buts and get a job. We do not. The only "welfare" program in America that spends real money is Medicaid, which pays for health care, and most of that goes to people who are really sick, or else to children. There are certainly some slackers collecting Social Security disability payments, but only the hardest core libertarians think we should abandon that program altogether, and as long as it exists some people will exploit it.

I generally accept the notion that people are poor in America because of something that is wrong with them, not some flaw in capitalism. But that something is often not their fault -- the best predictor of poverty in America is mental illness, and I think we should absolutely be taking care of people with medical problems. And even where people have genuinely screwed up -- and this is the key point -- what are we going to do about it? Many conservatives think that the existence of miserable poverty is good and important, because it motivates people to work hard. If there is no penalty for failing to get up and go to work in the morning, the argument goes, more and more people will opt out of work and society as a whole will get lazier and less productive. Liberals think that if you give people the help they need, a lot fewer of them will end up poor.

Consider a 22-year-old single mother who had a child at 16 and dropped out of high school and generally screwed up her life but now wants to get back on track. I suppose the conservative attitude would be to say, "great, work hard, we're pulling for you." A liberal asks what we as a society can do to help her and her child. What does she need? Child care? Free GED classes? drug treatment? Help finding a job? What if she want to become, say, a medical tech of some kind. A liberal wants to provide her with free or at least very cheap classes at the local community college. Is that some kind of disreputable handout that cheats the people whose taxes pay for it, or is it how we create a world in which everyone really has a chance to rise or fall by his own efforts?

My biggest complaint about conservative economics is the element of bad faith. It is simply not true that low tax, low regulation societies have more social mobility; more poor people rise into the middle class in Denmark and Sweden than here. It is not true that low taxes on the rich help to create a more dynamic economy in which poor people can get ahead more easily. It is not true that governments fail at everything they attempt, or that they are inherently less efficient than private firms. When conservatives spout these lies, I hear the desperate self-justification of greedy people who just hate paying taxes because they don't give a damn about anyone else. To create a society with real equality of opportunity -- something conservatives claim to believe in -- actually takes massive government intervention, not lower taxes on millionaires. A society in which everyone actually has the same chance to succeed or fail by his own efforts has never yet existed, and we still have a long way to go to create one.

Ikenaga Yasunari

Contemporary Japanese artist who seems to paint only women and cats. Or maybe, women's faces surrounded by Japanese fabrics. Above, Emiko. Below, top to bottom, Manami, Mai, and Sachiko. More at the artist's web site.

Archaeology on the Shenandoah River

I visited an archaeological site yesterday along the Shenandoah River in Virginia that some of my colleagues are excavating for a bridge replacement. The site is stratified, with major components in the Late Woodland (ca. 900 to 1300 AD) and Early Woodland (ca. 1350 to 800 BC) periods, separated by a nice sterile zone. There are complications with the stratigraphy and the dating, but I think the excavators will be able to sort everything out and get some good results.

Cleaning up a hearth in the Early Woodland layers. This and numerous other features produced datable charcoal, so the site should produce a good suite of dates.

Nice view from the site, and it was a gorgeous day.

Winchester's Young George Washington

I was in Winchester, Virginia yesterday, and I admired their statue of George Washington as a young man, by Malcolm Harlow. I mean, the guy wasn't born old. Harlow, the sculptor, is better known as one of the main stone carvers at the National Cathedral.

Young Men Living with their Parents

According to the Census Bureau, 19% of men aged 25 to 34 are currently living with their parents, up from 14% before the recession.

I have three sons. I think that means the chance that all three will be living elsewhere when the youngest hits 25 is 53% (0.81*0.81*0.81), so the odds of a quiet retirement are still (barely) in my favor.

Of course, I also have two daughters, and the Census Bureau says that 10% of women aged 25 to 34 are living with their parents. So my chance of having an empty nest is really only 0.81*0.81*0.81*0.90*0.90, or 43%.

Boris the Torturer

Glenn Carle reviews the new memoir by FBI Agent Ali Soufan:

The third theme of The Black Banners is the most disturbing, poignant and effective section of the book: Soufan's growing disgust at how the interrogation methods developed and imposed on the intelligence community by the Bush Administration undermine our principles, break our laws, and do not work-indeed, how they actually hinder our intelligence work. Soufan and his colleagues in the FBI had been successfully interrogating terrorists for years before the sudden introduction of "enhanced interrogation techniques"-"torture" is the word a layman would use. We see convincing, devastating proof in his detailed descriptions of how, in case after case (e.g., Jamal Al-Fadl, Abu Jandal, Abu Zubaydah, Khaled bin Rasheed and on and on) he and his colleagues successfully interrogated al-Qaeda members by "establish[ing] rapport" with them, by talking about religion, or family, by sharing a taste for sweets, or by laughing with them, if necessary, rather than by intimidating and physically abusing a detainee. He describes his and his colleagues' consternation when confronted with the snake oil salesmen who peddled and imposed "enhanced interrogation techniques"-a pseudo-expert the CIA brought in to oversee interrogations, whom Soufan gives the appropriately menacing and foolish sobriquet "Boris"-who had never conducted an interrogation, knew nothing about terrorism, and who knew nothing about intelligence work. "Why is this necessary" Soufan asked when first confronted with such measures as sensory deprivation, overload, or humiliation, "given that Abu Zubydah is cooperating?" As "Boris" tinkered with ever-increasingly harsh, and ever-ineffective, ways to break detainees, Soufan and his colleagues tried to oppose them, but as was the case with everyone involved in the interrogation program (myself included,) failed. Soufan and the FBI formally ceased any involvement in the case. "I can no longer remain here. Either I leave or I'll arrest [Boris]." It is telling that, to my knowledge, four individuals with first-hand experience in interrogations during the "War on Terror," have spoken out about enhanced interrogation methods: two Air Force officers (Steve Kleinman and another officer writing under the pseudonym Matthew Alexander), an FBI officer (Soufan), and a CIA officer (myself). All of us, independently, make the same points: interrogation must be based on rapport; enhanced interrogation methods are ineffective, counterproductive, immoral, illegal, and unnecessary, and they had nothing to do with obtaining much, if any, information not otherwise obtainable. It is only apologists for the Bush Administration, or Bush Administration policymakers themselves, who assert that "enhanced interrogation techniques" are legal, or work. Soufan is devastating about these methods: "The person or persons running the program were not sane....the interrogation was stepping over the line from borderline torture. Way over the line." "In FBI headquarters, the situation was clear....What Boris was doing was un-American and ineffective."

Is Iraq Lost?

Krauthammer has a savage go at Obama today, blaming him for "losing Iraq." After all the successes of the Bush years, Kratuhammer tells us,

Obama was left with but a single task: Negotiate a new status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) to reinforce these gains and create a strategic partnership with the Arab world’s only democracy.

He blew it. Negotiations, such as they were, finally collapsed last month. There is no agreement, no partnership. As of Dec. 31, the U.S. military presence in Iraq will be liquidated. . . .

Three years, two abject failures. The first was the administration’s inability, at the height of American post-surge power, to broker a centrist nationalist coalition governed by the major blocs — one predominantly Shiite (Maliki’s), one predominantly Sunni (Ayad Allawi’s), one Kurdish — that among them won a large majority (69 percent) of seats in the 2010 election.

Vice President Biden was given the job. He failed utterly. The government ended up effectively being run by a narrow sectarian coalition where the balance of power is held by the relatively small (12 percent) Iranian-client Sadr faction.

I find this baffling. How on earth were Obama and Biden supposed to force Iraqi politicians who mistrust each other -- maybe hate is a better word -- to form a coalition government? More to the point, is it really any of our business how elected Iraqi politicians manage their affairs? Iraq is, as Krauthammer reminds us, a democracy, which means (or ought to) that Iraqi leaders are answerable to their constituents, not US interests.

The second failure was the SOFA itself. U.S. commanders recommended nearly 20,000 troops, considerably fewer than our 28,500 in Korea, 40,000 in Japan and 54,000 in Germany.

But, see, the Iraqis don't want us there. Really don't want us there. And one of the big reasons they don't want us there is all the Iraqis we killed during the fabulously successful Bush administration. We acted like conquerors, like occupiers, and as a result we are hated. And since Iraq is now a democracy, something Krauthammer seems proud of, the will of the vast majority prevailed and we are going to leave. Isn't that what is supposed to happen?

I also dispute that Iraq was really in such great shape when Bush left office. Many US officers and diplomats thought then and still think that renewed civil war was all but inevitable. Bombs go off every week, killing dozens or hundreds.

Personally I think Iraq is likely to muddle through as a semi-democracy, with a high level of violence but not open war. And I think the presence or absence of 20,000 US troops would not have much impact on the matter; any added stability they might provide to the government would be balanced by the anger they create among Sadrites and other nationalists, besides spreading the sense that the government represents the US rather than Iraqis. So I think our leaving Iraq, in a way that does not look like a retreat, is the best possible outcome.

If Iraq was ever "won," it has not been "lost," and now the matter is in the hands of Iraqis, where it belongs.

Roman Portus

If you have ever read any ancient history, you may have encountered the statement that Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber, was the port of Rome. Not entirely true. Ostia was a terrible port, and the Tiber is really bad for shipping, so before the end of the Republican period it had become very difficult to bring in enough grain through Ostia to feed the city's immense population. This was the sort of problem the Romans were good at solving, so they went to work providing their city with an alternative port. The hexagonal pond near Rome's airport, above, more than 1600 feet (500 meters) across, is the most dramatic surviving remnant of the alternative port built by the emperors to feed their city. This was called simply Portus.

The work was begun under emperor Claudius and the port was opened by Nero, along with a new road connecting the port to Rome. Then Emperor Trajan improved and expanded the harbor by having the huge hexagonal basin excavated, and a canal built connecting it to the Tiber. From that time until the fall of the western Empire, most of Rome's shipping went by this route. The complex included immense granaries and other warehouses, administrative buildings, a large garrison, and a huge palace.

Archaeologists are investigating Portus in a long-term, multinational project headed by Simon Keays of the University of Southampton. The remains are so immense that uncovering more than a tiny fraction of them using traditional archaeological methods would be impossible. So the project emphasizes remote sensing, especially ground-penetrating radar, some digging with machines, and had digging in a few selected spots.

One of the recent discoveries was an immense building along the north side of the Trajanic harbor, 475 feet (145 meters) long, that the investigators think was a drydock for building or repairing ships.

The outer harbor sported a lighthouse built as a smaller copy of the famous one at Alexandria. The Portus project has many cgi renderings of the port and its buildings on their web site.

When you wonder why medieval and early modern Europeans were so entranced by the ancients and had such respect for even stupid ideas that they found in ancient books, you have to remember that they lived, literally, amidst the ruins of Rome. After Rome fell, no European government could have undertaken a project this big until the late 1700s -- and this was just one of hundreds of such works built by the Romans, from Hadrian's Wall to the Egyptian desert. Many people who lived side by side with the relics of Roman might felt keenly the inferiority of their own power to shape the world, and that bred reverence for classical civilization.

New Frontiers and Human Evolution

A new computer study of the Charlevoix Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean region in Quebec suggests that the first European pioneers in an area had a great impact on the make-up of the later population, leaving many more modern descendants than those who came later. Women on the Quebec frontier had 15 percent more children overall and 20 percent more children who married and had children than those who remained in more settled areas, and this impact persisted long enough to have an effect that lasted until modern times. Even today, most of the genes in the population were carried by people in the first generation of settlement. The study covered all the people who married in the district between 1686 and 1960, more than one million in all.

As the authors note, this might have major implications for human evolution. Mass movements into new, frontier zones have happened many times in human history. If those in the first wave gained a selective advantage (as this study shows was true in Quebec), this would have led to the spread of genes influencing things like boldness, restlessness, and curiosity that led people to move to the frontier.

Writing and the High-Wire Clown

It interested me particularly that in the circus there was one wistful clown who climbed the high wire after the experts were done, and scared himself and us with his uproariously funny, incredibly maladroit moves up there. Slipping and sliding about, losing his hat, his floppy shoes, and holding on to the wire for dear life, he was actually doing stunts far more difficult than any that had gone on before.

This was confirmed, invariably, as he doffed his clown garments one by one and emerged from the woeful little potbellied misfit as the star who headlined the high-wire act. In his tights and glistening bare torso he pulled off his bulbous nose and stood spotlighted on the platform with one arm raised to receive our wildest applause for having led us through our laughter, our fear, to simple awe.

I took profound instruction from this hoary circus routine. It was not merely that I, the sniffler with the red nose, would someday in my good time reveal myself to be a superman among men. There was art in the thing, the power of illusion, the mightier power of the reality behind it. What was first true was then false, a man was born from himself. All the problems of my own being were not the truth of me.

I knew. In my own eyes I was a man no matter what daily evidence was thrown in my face to the contrary. But that there were ways to dramatize this to an unsuspecting world was the keenness of my understanding. You didn't have to broadcast everything you knew all at once, but could reveal it suspense-fully, and make them first cry out in fear, and make them laugh, and, above all, make them applaud, when they finally saw what an achievement had been yours by taking on so well and accurately the comic being of a little kid.

--E.L. Doctorow, World's Fair

Hyenas Deserve More Respect

Lions are wimps by comparison:

Two hyenas escaped from a South African wildlife park Wednesday by chewing through an electric fence during a power outage, but were recaptured within half an hour, the park said. "The power went off... and the hyenas -- who will chew through wire and even iron bars -- managed to escape," said Earl Smith, general manager of the Lion Park, located just outside Johannesburg. "The hyenas always try to escape if there is a long power failure. The lions don't try to escape," he told the [South African Press Association].

The Greek Government Punts

Greece faces a miserable choice: either stay in the Euro and accept the terms dictated by France and Germany, offering a 50% cut in Greek debt in exchange for even more draconian cuts in government spending than the ones that have already driven Greeks to violent protests, followed by (mostly likely) a decade of economic stagnation, or, leave the Euro and default on their debts, which would trigger a terrible financial and economic crisis and then nobody knows what. So the government, knowing it would face intense criticism no matter what it did, has called a referendum and asked the voters to decide. That way the government can say, as things get awful (as they will), "we are only doing what the voters insisted."

The Wages of Sexual Harassment

Herman Cain gets accused of sexual harassment, sends out email to potential supporters complaining about mistreatment by the liberal media, and raises $400,000 in campaign contributions.

It is hard to overestimate the degree to which many American conservatives hate the big newspapers and the network news.