Jobs vs. the Deficit

Terrific graphic from Gallup showing what Americans worry about. Only people with household incomes over $75,000 worry much about the deficit. Other Americans worry more about jobs.  Since the Republican party has decided that only the deficit matters, I think we know who they represent.

Archaeology of the Libyan Desert

As I already wrote about another archaeological discovery, the desert of southern Libya has not always been as dry and inhospitable as it is now. Archaeological evidence shows that some parts of the Sahara were inhabited as little as a thousand years ago.

Italian archaeologists working in southwest Libya have documented a number of important sites, including stone monuments (top) and rock carvings (above).

These can be added to the already very extensive inventory of rock art, both painted and carved, that has been found in the region.

Euro's Collapse Holds Up Scottish Independence

The Scottish National Party dominates Scotland's Parliament, and they would like for Scotland to become independent of the UK. The main issue holding up independence is money, or, more specifically, what sort of currency an independent Scotland would use. The old plan was to use the Euro. (The Scots are generally more pro-European than the English.) But with the Euro still in crisis and dragging down the economy of Europe with it, nobody is very enthusiastic about that right now. It has recently been suggested that Scotland would form a currency union with Britain and keep using the pound. Alas, this does not avoid the Euro's fundamental problem, of countries with independent economic policies sharing a single currency  -- not to mention that the British Exchequer has no particular incentive to help the Scots make such a union work. Scotland could, of course, create its own currency, but since the Scottish government has no fiscal track record investors would probably distrust their currency, imposing real costs on the Scottish economy.

Another issue that looms large now, but which I assume will be worked out in the long term, is that the UK just bailed out Scotland's two biggest banks at a cost that could come to £70bn. In London they think Scotland should take on that debt, while in Edinburgh they say the banks failed because of poor regulation from London, so the English should pay the price of their own crony capitalism.

I have to say that I am deeply puzzled by nationalism in general and the desire for Scottish independence in particular. The Scots willingly joined Britain back in 1709, by a vote of their own Parliament, so it's not like union was forced on them. They already have their own national sports teams, and they control the education of their children. I just don't see what they would gain from formal independence that would be worth the heavy economic cost of separation, calculated at around £2600 per person per year (more than $5,000). Without London to bail out their banks, Scotland would now be facing the same kind of bankruptcy as Ireland and Iceland. Yes, Scotland has a wonderful history, but some of the best parts -- the Scottish enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the engineering achievements of the nineteenth, the bravery of their soldiers in helping to defeat Napoleon and Hitler -- came while they were part of Britain. Why does local pride require political independence?

A Hot Pond in Iceland

A "silica pond" in the interior of Iceland, by David Remacle.

The Boiling Ethnic Cauldron of South Sudan

Optimists thought that the birth of South Sudan as an independent nation would finally bring peace to the troubled region. Pessimists said the new nation was divided among too many mutually hostile ethnic groups and civil war was a more likely outcome.

Right now pessimism is winning:

South Sudan, born six months ago in great jubilation, is plunging into a vortex of violence. Bitter ethnic tensions that had largely been shelved for the sake of achieving independence have ruptured into a cycle of massacre and revenge that neither the American-backed government nor the United Nations has been able to stop.

The United States and other Western countries have invested billions of dollars in South Sudan, hoping it will overcome its deeply etched history of poverty, violence and ethnic fault lines to emerge as a stable, Western-friendly nation in a volatile region. Instead, heavily armed militias the size of small armies are now marching on villages and towns with impunity, sometimes with blatantly genocidal intent. 

At the small town of Pibor (above), Nuer fighters recently tried to massacre the Murle inhabitants:

Eight thousand fighters just besieged this small town in the middle of a vast expanse, razing huts, burning granaries, stealing tens of thousands of cows and methodically killing hundreds, possibly thousands, of men, women and children hiding in the bush.

The raiders had even broadcast their massacre plans. “We have decided to invade Murleland and wipe out the entire Murle tribe on the face of the earth,” the attackers, from a rival ethnic group, the Nuer, warned in a public statement. 

Four hundred UN peacekeepers were on hand, but they did little, saying they feared being massacred themselves.

Actually, the Federal Government is Efficient

Mitt Romney thinks we should turn a Federal anti-poverty programs into block grants to the states:

Well, what we don’t need is to have a federal government saying we’re going to solve all the problems of poverty across the entire country, because what it means to be poor in Massachusetts is different than Montana and Mississippi and other places in the country. And that’s why these programs, all these federal programs that are bundled to help people and make sure we have a safety net, need to be brought together and sent back to the states. . . . What unfortunately happens is, with all the multiplicity of federal programs, you have massive overhead with government bureaucrats in Washington administering all these programs. Very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them.

Here are the latest figures on the actual overhead of Federal anti-poverty programs, including both the state and Federal bureaucracies:

In 2010, 96.2 percent of Medicaid spending went for care; 94.6 percent of food stamp spending went for food; and 90.9 percent of housing program dollars went to rental assistance for low-income tenants.

Social Security and Medicare are also very efficient; in fact I would say that Medicare is too efficient, and ought to scrutinize the bills it pays a lot more carefully. Federal job training is very expensive, for reasons I don't really understand, but that seems to be a special case.

Our government is not expensive because it is inefficient or bloated or corrupt -- although of course it has those problems, like all bureaucracies. It is expensive because we ask a lot of it.

Emma McNally, Drawings

Church of Rodel

Isle of Lewis, Scotland, by Jim Richardson.

The Amoral Weirdness of Mitt Romney

Matt Miller, contemplating Romney's "I like to fire people" debacle, puts his finger on the thing about Romney that bothers people. As Romney complains, the "fire people" line was taken out of context. But the context it was taken out of was a lie about Obama's health care plan:

“I don’t want to live in a world where we have Obamacare telling us which insurance we have to have, which doctor we can have, which hospital we go to,” Romney said in a rare news conference Monday afternoon to clarify his remarks. “I believe in the setting as I described this morning, where people are able to choose their own doctor, choose their own insurance company. If they don’t like their insurance company or their provider, they can get rid of it.” On Tuesday he added: “I was talking about, as you know, insurance companies. We’d all like to get rid of our insurance companies — don’t want Obama to tell us we can’t.”

Which is just nuts. However it ends up working in practice, the Affordable Care Act is supposed to promote competition among insurance companies and make it easier to "fire" one company and switch to another. Romney, of all people ought to understand this, since Obama's plan is essentially a copy of the one Romney himself passed in Massachusetts:

Now, if Rick Perry had said this, you might say that the man just doesn’t know whereof he speaks. When Rush Limbaugh makes such bogus claims, you put it down to the ravings of an entertainer and propagandist. But Romney is a smart man. He’s also supposed to be a serious man, not a huckster. He knows better. Yet he’s made these outrageous false claims repeatedly. So this is a conscious, premeditated Big Lie.

Here’s another wrinkle. Romney’s passage of that health-care law – the one he’s mischaracterizing when he’s not busy running away from it – was a landmark achievement. He was the only governor who passed a bipartisan universal health-care bill. Facts are facts.

So what are we supposed to think of this man?

Here’s what we know. Romney will very casually tell the Big Lie if he thinks it will help him win. He’ll also work to enact universal health coverage if he thinks it’s a sensible path for his constituents and serves his own political ambitions once in office. Does this make him shameless and untrustworthy? A problem-solver? Both? Is belief in his own claim on power the only core conviction we can count on from Mitt Romney? 

Citizens United and the Mad Billionaire

Newt Gingrich, mad as hell at Mitt Romney for burying him in Iowa under an avalanche of negative ads, is not going to take defeat lying down. Dana Milbank:

But there are 5 million reasons Republicans have to fear Gingrich. That’s the number of dollars billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson gave to a pro-Gingrich super PAC — the largest contribution to a candidate’s cause in U.S. history. This allowed the Winning our Future PAC to buy $3.4 million worth of ads in South Carolina — enough to saturate the state with poisonous messages about Mitt Romney. The 29-minute video taking apart Romney’s performance at Bain Capital, released Wednesday, provides a taste of what’s to come in the next week.

In this post-modern, heavily ironic election, populist attacks on the business practices of a leading capitalist are being funded by another leading capitalist, in support of a former Republican Speaker of the House. This is the fruits of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which equated spending money to buy ads with free speech. Now there is nothing the government can do to keep any millionaire from buying political ads for or against any candidate or cause. Reaction to this was largely along party lines: Democrats, who see themselves as the party of the poor, were aghast, while Republicans, who like to think they speak for the "successful," said it was no big deal. Milbank again:

Romney, on his way to South Carolina, complained explicitly that Gingrich was against “free enterprise.” Romney has it wrong. Gingrich’s attacks on him are the very essence of free enterprise: They’re helped by campaign finance laws that sell elections to the highest bidder. For those Republicans who thought that unlimited political contributions would be a good thing for their party, it’s a delicious irony that a casino billionaire is using his money to underwrite a populist assault on the GOP front-runner.

Indeed. Because, see,  there may be a few more billionaires who support Republicans than Democrats, but there are left-wing billionaires and even more who are just cranks. Who knows what oddball billionaire might step up next with an ax to grind?

I disagree with Milbank, though, that this represents selling elections to the highest bidder. Campaign ads have an impact, but they are rarely decisive. In a Presidential election, the economy matters much more. But it sure is fun to watch Romney and Gingrich accuse each other of "cronyism" and ignoring the common good.

Starr Carr

Starr Carr is a Mesolithic camp site in Yorkshire, England, dating to 9000 to 8500 BC. The site was first excavated in 1949, and you may have learned about it if you ever took an archaeology course. Excavations resumed in 2006, and new trenches were opened. In one of these the excavators reported finding Britain's oldest house (above), which was round, the roof supported on posts driven into the soft ground. The house measured about 3.5 m (11 feet) across.

Now a new phase of the project is set to begin, focused on the residents' response to climate change. (Need funding? Tie your work to climate change.)

The remarkable thing about the site is the preservation. The camp was along the boggy shore of a now-vanished lake, and the waterlogged conditions preserved large quantities of wood and bone. In the picture above you can see how much wood there is in the wet parts of the site.

For unknown reasons, the residents so wanted to be at the lake shore that they built wooden platforms like the one above, shown in a photograph from 1950. The original interpretation was that the residents lived on these platforms, but at the time only the wet part of the site had been dug. Excavations in the higher, drier parts of the site show that the residents likely spent more time up there. So what were they doing on the lake shore? Not fishing, since no fish or turtle bones have been found.

 

Sitting on those platforms, they spent a good part of their time working antler into tools and weapons. More than 200 barbed antler points like the ones above have been found at the site. But if the site was a workshop for making bone and antler tools, why not put it on higher, drier ground?

 

Even more intriguing are these antler "frontlets", or forehead masks, 21 of which have been found at the site. Were these headdresses, or decorations? If they were headdresses, were these used to sneak up on deer, or were they for ritual purposes?

The site is amazing, but like most archaeological sites it raises as many questions as it answers. The desire of prehistoric Europeans to live in wetlands -- Starr Carr, the Alpine like villages, the Crannogs of Ireland -- is puzzling, the antler frontlets are an intriguing mystery, and you have to wonder, after seeing how much wood and bone is present in this bog, about all the material that has disappeared from sites where only stone remains.

Bare Bottoms at the Supreme Court

During Supreme Court oral arguments about the FCC's indecency regulations, attorney Seth Waxman, representing ABC, complained about the FCC's arbitrary definition of indecency:

Waxman patiently explains to the rapt justices that ABC was never sanctioned for over a dozen NYPD Blue episodes over nine seasons that included bare buttocks. Not until the last one. Arbitrary, bad FCC. Then, he raises his arms, Moses-like, to the glorious friezes that surround the interior of the ceremonial courtroom. And then Waxman points to one sculpted classical stone lawgiver after another as he guides the justices through the fleeting bottoms that pervade their lofty spaces: “There's a bare buttock there, and there's a bare buttock here,” he marvels. “And there may be more that I hadn't seen. But frankly, I had never focused on it before.” To which Justice Antonin Scalia grits out, “Me neither,” while all of the justices gape up at the walls above them, like bemused Muppets on Veterinarian Hospital.

The Greek Collapse

I'm glad I don't live in Greece:

Unemployment has surged to 18.8 percent from 13.3 percent only a year ago. Overburdened public hospitals are facing acute shortages of everything from syringes to bandages because of budget cuts, with hiring freezes forcing the mothballing of operating rooms even as more unemployed are relying on the public health system. Rates of homelessness, suicide, crime and HIV cases from intravenous drug use are jumping.

Greece has been forced to cut spending and raise taxes in the middle of a severe downturn, slashing pensions as well as state salaries, jobs and services. As public confidence has evaporated, consumer spending — the biggest driver of the economy — has plunged, generating cascading losses at private firms. The result is a dizzying economic plummet and social crisis that is bringing the cradle of Western civilization to its knees.

“Conditions have deteriorated so dramatically that doctors in this country now believe that the Greek crisis is no longer just a financial crisis but a humanitarian crisis,” said Dimitris Varnavas, the president of the Federation of Greek Hospital Doctors’ Unions.

If Greece had its own currency, that currency would have plummeted in value, and the country would now be full of northern Europeans coming to scoop up bargains in travel, vacation homes, etc. Greek olives, olive oil, wine and cheese would be so cheap they would flood out into the world market. And eventually this would stabilize the economy.

But Greece is under the Euro, and that means their currency can't fall. So Greece has not become a bargain and their exports remain expensive even as their economy collapses. Nobody knows how this can be resolved because it has never happened before.

I think the Greeks need to get out of the Euro now.  They have dug themselves into a terrible hole, and it will be painful to get out whatever they do, but at least outside the Euro they have more control over their own destiny.

Conservatism, Tribal Loyalty, and Mitt Romney

Many Republican activists have said publicly that they could never support John Huntsman for President because of his service as Obama's ambassador to China. As Will Wilkinson points out, this is a great example of a phenomenon that sociologists have found to be general: conservatives care much more than liberals about group loyalty. Conservatives talk a lot more about patriotism than liberals partly because of their emphasis on group loyalty, and they are more likely to judge their leaders on who they are rather than particular policies. Republican activists stuck with George W. Bush despite his free-spending ways because he was one of them; progressive activists don't really care who Obama is, they're just pissed that he hasn't governed farther to the left.

For Erick Erickson, Huntsman has shown disloyalty in two ways, first by accepting appointment from the leader of the other party and then scheming against that leader:

While serving as the United States Ambassador to China, our greatest strategic adversary, Jon Huntsman began plotting to run against the President of the United States. This calls into question his loyalty not just to the President of the United States, but also his loyalty to his country over his own naked ambition. . . .  Loyalty is a primary issue for me and there need be no further evidence that he is disloyal.

Wilkinson:

Rock-ribbed conservatives I think see it like this: By agreeing to serve as ambassador to China under Barack Obama, Mr Huntsman picked a side, and it wasn't the side of the conservative tribe. And then he flaked on the Obama administration in order to run for president as a Republican. This is how I read Mr Erickson's denunciation of Mr Huntsman: "Are you crazy, Huntsman? You want back in? Now? No. Forget about it. You're dead to us."

And this brings us to Mitt Romney, whose march to the GOP nomination continued in New Hampshire yesterday. Conservative activists oppose him because he is not one of them, full stop. So what if the policies he is advocating now are far to the right, and if his past deviations from conservative purity are no greater than those of Newt Gringrich or W. He is not their guy.

Romney's path to the Presidency is tough and getting harder. He will win the nomination without the support of the party's energized, activist base, and his Republican opponents have tried out and thus legitimized attacks on his record as a predatory capitalist. To disarm conservative opposition in the primary he has taken far right positions on issues from Iran to Medicare that will not help him win moderate voters in the fall. And the economy is improving.

A Nok Head from Nigeria

The Nok were the first Iron Age people of west Africa, and their culture lasted from around 1000 BC to AD 500. Their most distinctive artifacts are unfired clay statues and figurines. Since they are so soft, most of those known have suffered from erosion and are far from perfect. This fine example was found last year in the Nigerian village of Kushe. It is about 2000 years old.

Mountains Near Tabriz, Iran

By Ali Shokri. More here.

Mahabat Maqbara, a Grand Indian Mausoleum

Mahabat Maqbara, a royal tomb dating to 1892, Junagadh, Gujarat, India, built in the "Saracenic" mixture of Indian and European styles.

Holyoke, Massachusetts: City of Empty Mills

Mt. Holyoke College is in the town of South Hadley, a pleasant suburban sort of place. But with time to kill before her interview, Mary and I decided to explore the closest place big enough for a dot on my state map, the city of Holyoke. So we crossed the Connecticut River on a long bridge and entered another world.

Holyoke was once a humming hive of industry, and now it is a vast complex of abandoned brick mills. The scale of the factory district amazed us, one huge mill after another along the banks of the city's two canals. At one time this was the largest center of paper manufacture in the world and also produced "steam pumps, blank books, silk goods, hydrants, bicycles and trolleys."

Behind the mills were rows of crumbling apartment buildings and burned out houses, and whole neighborhoods where every person we saw on the street was Hispanic. (According to wikipedia, Holyoke has the highest percentage of Puerto Rican inhabitants of any city outside Puerto Rico, 38%, and overall the city's 39,000 inhabitants are 48% Hispanic.)

The city grew up around a dam built at the largest falls on the Connecticut River, which was begun in 1849. The entire city was planned by the consortium of investors who built the dam, and they laid out a neat grid of streets extending back from the four miles of canals dug by immigrant Irishmen.

A few of the mill buildings are ruined, but most look to be in good shape and some seem to have been adapted to new uses.

It was startling to find such a place amidst the green hills and historic villages of western Massachusetts, which shows the value of driving to the next town just to see what's there.

Leonardo da Vinci's Bag

Sketch for a leather bag, reconstructed from notebook fragments, and soon to be marketed by the Italian fashion house Gherardini.

Ron Paul is Wrong: Civilization is Not Crumbling

The latest apocalyptic cult to take off in America has nothing to do with the Rapture or the Mayan Calendar. It's the Ron Paul campaign.

Ron Paul often speaks as if the collapse of civilization is imminent, and he has personally put most of his savings in a stockpile of gold. The Post has a feature today on some Paul followers who believe America is on the edge of the abyss:

He had already heard Ron Paul speak on C-SPAN dozens of times. He had read and re-read the 1970s book “None Dare Call It Conspiracy,” about international banking magnates and the loss of civil liberties, which, he said, “totally relates to today.” He’d become steeped in the details of monetary policy, economic bubbles and national security issues, which to him add up to an increasingly bleak picture of America, which helps him understand the increasingly trying circumstances of his own life.

“Once you see the truth, it can’t be unseen anymore,” Way likes to say. And these days, he was trying to figure out what he was supposed to do about that, about the overwhelming prospect that American civilization is crumbling.

Where, I ask you, is the evidence that American civilization is crumbling? Is it the falling crime rate? The economic growth we have been experiencing for most of the past year? The absence of terrorist attacks and riots? Yes, the 2008 market collapse showed that our version of capitalism has problems, and the collapse led to a severe recession. But here the important thing: in the face of market chaos, governments stepped up and stabilized the situation across most of the world. Things aren't great, but they aren't awful either, and only a paranoid mind can think our system is doomed.

I am no Mr. Sunshine myself. But our civilization is old and strong, and it is not going to disappear in a hurry.

More College Visits

My daughter Mary and I are on a whirlwind tour of colleges in Massachusetts. Today she had interviews at Smith and Mt. Holyoke. I loved Smith, which has a great campus and really strong programs in things Mary is interested in. Downtown Northhampton is also right across the street, and it is a really cute town. Mary in her interview outfit above.

The Smith Lake.

Mary under an interesting Northampton Street Sign.

Mt. Holyoke also has a beautiful campus (above) and an excellent program, but it is in a sort of suburban area, not as appealing to me as Northampton. But both schools are in a consortium with Amherst College and U-Mass Amherst, and there is a free bus that runs among them, and I think that would make Mt. Holyoke livable. I would be thrilled if she went to either.

The Magical Illustrations of Kinuko Y. Craft

Kinuko Y. Craft is an artist based in Connecticutt who is most famous for her illustrations of fairy tales. More on her web site. And I couldn't find any pictures from what I think is her best effort, The Twelve Dancing Princesses.

 

New Defense Budget Declares an End to the War on Terror

Last week President Obama went to the Pentagon to talk about the defense budget. But he put his remarks in the context of winding down our decade-long war against Muslim extremists. "The tide of war is receding," he said at the Pentagon, and "we’ve succeeded in defending our nation."

As David Ignatius put it, the President 

was declaring that the era that began on Sept. 11, 2001, is over. Al-Qaeda’s top leader is dead, and most of its cadres are on the run; secret peace talks are under way with the Taliban. And across the Arab world, the United States is talking with Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist organizations that a few years ago might have been on terror lists. It’s a process that’s similar to the way Britain ended its long war with Irish terrorists, by engaging in negotiations with the IRA’s “political” wing.

This was a war that could never be ended by a final battle, or by the signing of some comprehensive treaty around a flag-covered table. It is now petering out into a series of police actions and civil wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, which we are going to leave to the locals to handle themselves.

I have no idea what will happen in Iraq or Afghanistan after our troops leave, and I fear Pakistan will continue down the same sad road of corruption, secret government, and increasing strife. But I feel optimistic about how this will play out in America. As war and fear recede, maybe we will bring some sense back into our public life and curtail the stupid policies, from torture to making arthritic old ladies take off their shoes at airports, that we embraced in the climate of war.

Thought for the Day

Love is letting the world be half-tamed.  

 --Jennifer Grotz

The Sand Sculptures of Carl Jara

I was writing the other day about contemporary artists needing gimmicks, and yesterday I stumbled across two more good examples. One was a guy who does his (very good) drawings on the back of envelopes. And then there is Carl Jara, who has made it big by traveling the world entering sand sculpture contests. Obviously he is working on a different plane than your average crafter of buxom mermaids. But seeing no path to an artistic career working in clay or stone, he went into sand, so all of these very interesting works get washed away by the tide.

 

 

The Personal and the Political

Ross Douthat writes today about the weird little controversy that flared up last week around the death of Rick Santorum's premature son. (He took the dead fetus home to let his other children “absorb and understand that they had a brother” before burying it.) From the inanity of these complaints about how another persona handles the loss of an infant, Douthat extracts an important lesson:

In a sense, one could say that these kinds of invasive debates become inevitable once the traditional zone of privacy around public figures collapses. But it would be more accurate to say that the zone of privacy has collapsed precisely because of the deep moral divisions that these kinds of controversies reveal. Privacy is a luxury of moral consensus.

Exactly.  In a society where everything about family life is done in the established way, or as dictated by priests or shamans who are agreed to be experts in such matters, nobody thinks choices made in private life have political meaning. But when matters like divorce and abortion are among the leading bones of political contention, private choices come to have political consequences.

In our society, little about marriage is a given. Marriage seems even to have swelled in importance to us as communities of neighborhood, class and church have weakened, and the choices we make in marriage now define who we are as much as anything else we do. When we ask, "Who is this person?" an answer like "a working class Catholic from Pittsburgh" is not very satisfying. In particular, that answer tells us nothing about this person's politics. A question like "Did he or she abort a fetus with Down's Syndrome?" seems to us much more informative. So we squabble in print about things that are really none of our business, and judge politicians by things that have little to do with the kind of policies they would support. We just don't know how else to get a handle on who people are.

Smilodon, the Saber-Toothed Wrestler

Two things are remarkable about the bones of the predators we call Saber Toothed Cats: the size of their canine teeth, and the size of their arm bones. Compared to modern cats like lions and tigers, they had massively muscled chests and front legs. Why?

Probably because they attacked their prey differently than modern cats:

Smilodon used its huge teeth in a very different way to its modern relatives. Living cats use their jaws to close the throat or nose of their prey, choking them to death. Their conical canines are well-suited to the task, able to withstand forces in all directions. Sabre-teeth, while they look formidable, were actually quite fragile. They were long and flattened, rather than short and conical. If the cat’s prey struggled, its teeth would have shattered. If the teeth hit bone during a bite, they would have shattered. So Smilodon used the sabres like an assassin’s dagger rather than a swordsman’s blade, dispatching victims with quick stabs. Its big arms helped it to restrain its prey for the killing blow.

Smilodons and similar beasts probably specialized in attacking very large prey; the massive muscles that made them strong enough to take on mastodons made them too slow to chase deer or pounce on rabbits. Which may explain why they went extinct when the giant mammals of the Americas died out.