More Vampire Skeletons, this Time from Bulgaria

More vampires:

SOFIA (AP).- Bulgarian archaeologists say they have unearthed centuries-old skeletons pinned down through their chests with iron rods — a practice believed to stop the dead from becoming vampires According to Bozhidar Dimitrov, head of the National History Museum in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, two skeletons from the Middle Ages were found in such a state last weekend near the Black Sea town of Sozopol. He said Tuesday that corpses were regularly treated in such a way before being buried in some parts of Bulgaria, even until the beginning of the last century. Widespread superstition led to iron rods being hammered through the chest bones and hearts of those who did evil during their lifetimes for fear they would return after death to feast on the blood of the living.

Not a bad summary, I would say. These are the tombs, found outside a monastery.

Another image of a skeleton impaled by an iron rod. Video here.

Fossil Feathers

The limestone beds of northeastern China continue to produce many beautiful dinosaur fossils, including dozens with well-preserved feathers. Dinosaur feathers have also been preserved in amber. All sorts of ancient feathers are turning up, from simple filaments to complex structures like those of modern birds. Some feathers are so well preserved that we can even make educated guesses about their color. The study of feathers and their evolution is now one of the hottest topics in paleontology, so look for many more announcements in the next few years. Above, an Archaeopteryx feather.

Epidexipteryx hui, a small dinosaur with long tail feathers.

Jinfengopteryx elegans.

Microraptor gui.

Sinosauropteryx.

And a series of feathers preserved in amber.

Still no Economic Populism in America

In Wisconsin, the unions failed to unseat union-busting governor Scott Walker. They chose this battle, and they lost it. Of all the numbers I have seen, I think the most interesting was that 37% of voters who live in union households voted for Walker. So did 12% of the people who plan to vote for Obama in the fall.

To me what this shows is that despite the Occupy movement and all the talk of the 99%, economic populism still has limited resonance with Americans. We just aren't very angry with the plutocrats. A majority of Americans still fears big government more than big business and the rich, and many on the left are more interested in ending foreign wars or protecting the environment than in union activism.

Why aren't we angry with the rich? Maybe because we really sort of are rich. I may be in the middle as contemporary Americans go, but compared to all the people who ever lived I am still in the richest 1%. That makes it hard to get really angry about economic unfairness. 

America in Photographs, 1935-1944

The Library of Congress is digitizing and putting online the huge collections of photographs assembled by the Farm Security Administration. Some of these images have long been famous, especially those by Walker Evans, but there are 175,000 negatives in the collection, many of which have been seen only by a few archivists. Above, garden in a migrant camp, Visalia, California, by Arthur Rothstein (1940).

General store in Moundville, Alabama by Walker Evans (1936).

Medicine Show, Huntingdon, Tennessee, by Ben Shahn (1935).

Making biscuits, Granville County, North Carolina, by Marion Post Wolcott (1939).

Basement house, Dead Ox Flat, Oregon, by Russell Lee (1941). One of the depression-era projects of the Bureau of Reclamation was the Owyhee Irrigation District, which used water from the Snake River to irrigate thousands of acres of desert in eastern Oregon. The first settlers in this new land used a common trick of the time and built the concrete-lined basements of their houses first, adding the above-ground levels in later years when they had more money. Of course some left before they ever built those upper stories, so not every concrete-lined basement you see abandoned in the American woods ever had an upstairs.

What Real Socialists Think of Obama

"It makes absolutely no sense ... [Obama's healthcare overhaul] is anything but socialist. It's bailing out for-profit companies," - Greg Pason, national secretary of the Socialist Party USA. 

Partisanship is the New Identity

The Pew Center has been conducting wide-ranging polling on Americans' values and politics since 1987. Over that fairly brief time, differences between blacks and whites, and between the rich and the poor, and between college graduates and non-graduates, have declined. But differences between Democrats and Republicans have intensified. Some highlights:

Twenty-five years ago, 62 percent of Republicans and 79 percent of Democrats said the government should take care of people who can’t take care of themselves. Today, 75 percent of Democrats agree with that statement, but the percentage of Republicans who agree has plummeted to 40 percent. . . .

In 1987, 93 percent of Democrats and 86 percent of Republicans said there should be stricter laws and regulations to protect the environment. In the latest survey, Democratic support is unchanged, but among Republicans it has plunged to 47 percent.

Democrats are more supportive of immigration rights than they once were, while Republican support has declined somewhat. The percentage of Democrats who say government should do more to ensure equal opportunity for blacks and other minorities has risen, more so than the decline among Republicans. . . .

Republicans increasingly feel that regulation does more harm than good, while Democrats increasingly disagree. Republicans see more waste and inefficiency, Democrats see less. And the share of Republicans who say the government is too involved in our daily lives has grown, while the number of Democrats who say this has decreased.

One of the things I believe more and more as I get older is that identity is everything. Where people think they fit in, who they think they are, matters more than almost anything else. Certainly it determines our politics. The thing that fascinates me most about American politics today is that how people stand on the issues has much less to do with naked economic interest than with these questions of identity. Big American corporations used to support single-payer health care, because it would save them tons of money, but now they oppose it, because their executives care more about being on the conservative side than about the details of policy. Poor, rural whites vote Republicans even though the Republican leadership is committed to curtailing farm subsidies, food stamps, Medicaid, and other programs that poor white people depend on as much as poor black people. Americans over 65 vote strongly Republican, even though the Medicare system they depend on can only be supported by raising taxes. Democrats used to oppose immigration because it reduced wages for workers, and corporate leaders supported it for the same reason; although this issue is less clearly partisan than the others I have mentioned, things have now switched around so that a majority of union members support immigration and a majority of Republicans oppose it.

Perusing the fascinating interactive database at Pew, I noticed that one thing people in both parties agree on is that we should "Pay less attention to overseas events and concentrate on problems at home." Maybe somebody could point this out to Mitt Romney? Another interesting item is that a large majority of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, thinks the government should more to make health care affordable. Still another is that a majority of Americans thinks "the government should guarantee everyone enough to eat and a place to sleep." Until 2009, Republican support for this notion hovered around 50 percent, but in the Tea Party era it has fallen to 33%.

Wildflowers of the Antietam Battlefield

Today.

Our Love of Enemies

David Rothko at Foreign Policy:

The United States is a bit like a 375-pound, middle-aged man with a heart condition walking down a city street at night eating a Big Mac. He's sweating profusely because he's afraid he might get mugged. But the thing that's going to kill him is the burger.

Since the end of the Cold War, America has been on a relentless search for enemies. I don't mean a search in the sense of ferreting them out and defeating them. I mean that America seems to have a visceral need for them. . . .

By far, the greatest threats to the United States right now are internal ones -- like that Big Mac. They don't come from terrorists. They come from political obstructionists and know-nothings who are blocking needed economic and political reforms, whether fixing a health-care system that poses a debt threat many times greater than the immense U.S. budget deficit or tackling the growing inequality in American society or overhauling the United States' money-corrupted, dysfunctional political process.

If America stopped searching for goblins under the bed, it might actually be able to reset its economic priorities and start investing in the things that would make the country stronger, more prosperous, and safer again, from infrastructure to energy security to better schools. What's more, Americans might find that a foreign policy that identified real risks but kept them in perspective and was more about deepening ties, finding common ground, and avoiding unnecessary conflict would work better than the tired us vs. them formulations of the recent past. 

Enemies give purpose to life for many people, and Americans in particular seem to need bad guys in their lives. The notion that we might have no enemies of any consequence -- which is, I think, our situation right now -- strikes people as, I don't know, absurd, or maybe empty. But I would argue that it is the truth.

Science, Politics, and Climate Change

New research shows that people who don't think human activity is changing the climate are not, on the whole, more scientifically illiterate those whose who do. The difference between the two groups is political:

Who will be receptive to climate science, the study found, depends more on cultural factors such as attitudes toward commerce, government regulation and individualism than on scientific literacy. “Simply improving the clarity of scientific information will not dispel public conflict” over climate, the study’s authors conclude online May 27 in Nature Climate Change. . . .

For the new study, Kahan and his colleagues surveyed 1,540 American adults on science, capacity to comprehend and use quantitative information, political orientation, attitudes on the roles of government and commercial enterprises in affecting risks to society and risks posed by climate. The survey characterized cultural outlooks along dimensions of individualism and egalitarianism. People with high degrees of individualism tended to have attitudes that were pro-industry and skeptical of risks. People exhibiting a high degree of egalitarianism “tended to be morally ambivalent towards markets because they think that’s what causes social disparities,” Kahan says.
The data show that on climate change issues, “cultural identity is what is disposing people to find evidence convincing or not,” Kahan says. And “the study shows this divide only gets bigger, for ordinary people, when they become better able to understand science.”

The notion that better information on climate science would change people's political ideas is nonsense. It is impossible for any complex scientific theory to be better attested than evolution, but millions of people reject that. As long as belief in anthropogenic climate change is said to require government economic regulation, people who hate regulation will believe otherwise.

Once you move beyond the most immediate, concrete things, what most people believe has very little to do with evidence.

Bruno Weber's Strange World

Bruno Weber (1931-2011) was a Swiss artist and architect. His early career was fairly conventional, with exhibits, commissions, sales, the usual stuff of an artist's life. The second half of his life was devoted to creating a sculpture park surrounding his house in Dietekon just west of Zurich. That's his house above, and below.

According to one critic, Weber was influenced by folklore and folk art from around the world, and he

envisaged his park as a “visionary counterworld” to the “concrete deserts” of the industrial urban landscape. 

It covers about 5 acres (2 hectares).

Bruno never paid any attention to zoning rules or building codes and at first he was regularly in trouble with the local authorities. But so many visitors came, spending good money, that he was eventually left alone.

This stuff is crazy, but it has an amazing vitality, and I would love to see the garden.

Rock Art of the Lower Pecos

In the desert region where the Pecos River meets the Rio Grande is one of the world's most fascinating collections of rock art. Paintings have been found in more than 250 rock shelters, some 100 meters long. The older works are in the style called Pecos River, which dates to between 2500 and 800 BCE; the most recent depict Europeans and horses. Intensify efforts are under way to record all of these amazing paintings before they fade any further. Above is a typical Pecos River panel, and there are more below.

Archaeologist Carolyn Boyd thinks these Pecos River scenes are unified compositions, not assemblages drawn at different times by different people. She thinks they depict shamanic journeys to the other lands, as still imagined by some Indian tribes such as the Huichol of Mexico. Among the prominent themes are peyote, and datura, the two plants used as hallucinogens by natives, deer, and rain. For people in this desert region, bringing the rain was the focus of many important rituals, and shamans regularly crossed to the other world in search of knowledge about when the rains would come and how to help them.

A Pecos River shaman.

This is a later style, Red Linear. 

The Red Monochrome style dates to the late prehistoric period, 1000 CE to historic times.

And an early historic work.

Thomas Robisheaux, The Last Witch of Langenburg

When you have read as much about witch trials as I have, they all start to run together. Another poor old woman is brought before the authorities, accused by her neighbors of killing their cattle or their children. The authorities are not really much interested in cattle poisoning; they want to know if the old woman has sold her soul to the devil and become part of the army of witches that threatens Christian civilization. If anything about her makes them suspicious that she has, they throw her in prison and drag her out at regular intervals to be questioned until she confesses. If necessary, she is tortured, but usually the repeated intense questioning over months or even years is enough in itself. Eventually she is burned, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of relatives or neighbors.

Thomas Robisheaux's The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Village (2009) is another tale of this basic type. What makes it interesting and unusual is that this suspected witch, Anna Schmieg, fell into the clutches of an investigator of the most fanatical Germanic thoroughness. Tobias Ulrich von Gülchen was Court Adviser to the Count of Langenburg, one of the many minor princes whose realms dotted the German Rhineland. He was trained in the law and in Lutheran theology, and he devoted his life to bringing order to his prince's small patrimony. Langenburg had been devastated in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and desperately needed some of the order that von Gülchen tried to bring it. If bureaucratic precision were enough, he would have succeeded brilliantly, since I have never seen a legal case as well documented as this one. Nor have I ever read about any ordinary person of the past whose life is as well known as Anna Schmieg's. Von Gülchen's questioning was a combination of police methods and religious instruction. He took Schmieg through her whole life, demanding that she confess all of her sins going back to childhood, trying to pinpoint the moment when she became the devil's minion.

Anna Schmieg's father died when she was a child, her mother when she was a teenager. Her stepfather, a schoolmaster, sent her to be a domestic servant in the household of her mother's sister, who was married to a tavern-keeper. The uncle was a successful man, the richest peasant in his village. In 1630 he was one of the leaders of a peasant protest movement called the Oberregenbach Assembly, which demanded tax relief and an end to the quartering of troops in their villages. Anna's brother went off to fight in the war and was never heard from again. Even though she was a propertyless orphan, Anna's guardians made a good match for her, marrying her into a family of well-off millers. (How her aunt must have crowed about that coup.) Hans Schmieg leased the lord's mill in the village of Bächlingen. Anna thus became one of the leading citizens of the village, the miller's wife, a person to be reckoned with. She never managed to fit into her new community, though. A quarrelsome person, she was regularly fined by the village court for fighting and swearing oaths. She also defied the court on several occasions, refusing to pay fines or petitioning to have them reduced. She was also, as she admitted to von Gülchen, a heavy drinker, and she sometimes invoked the devil's name when she was drunk. Of her seven children, only two reached adulthood, the others dying at ages between two months and 5 years.

But this is only the beginning of what we know about Anna Schmieg. When know that she talked to her pigs when she fed them, "as people do." We know that she would not share the cherries from her favorite tree with her neighbors. We know that her husband, troubled by repeated breakdowns in the machinery of his mill, decided that it was haunted by an evil spirit and obtained "several" cat heads from the court executioner and buried them around the mill to keep the spirits away. (Executioners were often thought to have occult knowledge, because of their profession, and some did a good business in the body parts of executed criminals.) We know that she lost her virginity when she was her uncle's servant, in the barn, with a friend of the uncle's that she described as a "whorish scoundrel." She and her daughter fell out because her daughter refused a match arranged by her parents and eloped with a neighbor boy -- the decisive moment in her trial came when her own daughter turned against her and accused her baking poisoned Shrovetide cakes. Her husband and son remained faithful to her to the end. It is quite remarkable to know a woman who died in 1672 in such detail.

The other thing I found most interesting about this case is that Robisheaux did not discover it. On the contrary, it has figured in local histories and general witchcraft books for a century, and two plays and a best-selling novel have been based (loosely) on Anna Schmieg's story. The thick bundle of papers that make up her trial record once appeared in a traveling museum exhibition on witchcraft. Like many other authors of famous history books, Robisheaux has taken one of the best known records of the past and re-examined in a new and very thorough way.

The Last Witch of Langenburg is a good book, and I recommend it. There are, however, many, many historical studies of witchcraft, and this one does not make my top ten list. If you want a thorough study of a single witchcraft case, I still recommend High Road to the Stake by Michael Kunze.

Lilies

Today.

Physics: It is 30 years that we fail

Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, in Edge:

I'm allowed to be polemical, in my field, in fundamental theoretical physics, it is 30 years that we fail. There hasn't been a major success in theoretical physics in the last few decades, after the standard model, somehow. Of course there are ideas. These ideas might turn out to be right. Loop quantum gravity might turn out to be right, or not. String theory might turn out to be right, or not. But we don't know, and for the moment, nature has not said yes in any sense.

I suspect that this might be in part because of the wrong ideas we have about science, and because methodologically we are doing something wrong, at least in theoretical physics, and perhaps also in other sciences.

Rovelli goes on to say that our training tells us to take data more seriously than theories, because theories change all the time. But Einstein, he says, turned this on its head. He took the existing theories of classical mechanics and Maxwell's equations very seriously, and asked what had to be done to make them fit with each other:

To force coherence between these two, the two theories, by challenging something completely different, which is something that is in our head, which is how we think about time. . . .

What are then the aspects of doing science that I think are under-evaluated, and should come up-front? First, science is about constructing visions of the world, about rearranging our conceptual structure, about creating new concepts which were not there before, and even more, about changing, challenging the a-priori that we have. So it's nothing to do about the assembly of data and the way of organizing the assembly of data. It has everything to do about the way we think, and about our mental vision of the world. Science is a process in which we keep exploring ways of thinking, and changing our image of the world, our vision of the world, to find new ones that work a little bit better.

Alas, it is one thing to say that we need a new way of thinking, and another to actually think in a new way.

Wadi Hitan, the Valley of Whales

In the Egyptian desert is a place called Wadi Hitan, an eroded mass of rock that was once on the bottom of a shallow sea. Among the denizens of that sea were the early whales known as Basilosaurus.

Wadi Hitan has produced dozens of Basilosaurus skeletons, making it one of the key sites for the study of whale evolution.

The vestigial hind limb of a Basilosaurus, a remnant of its ancestors' life on land.

Nummulites and other fossil sea creatures. Great National Geographic feature on Wadi Hitan here.

Yes, Breast Feeding is Natural

The Post regularly runs these "Five Myths about X" columns that are supposed to debunk widely held but false beliefs about topics in the news. Today we get Five Myths about Breast Feeding. Myth Number one is:

Breast feeding is natural.

I kid you not.

Let me get this straight. We belong to an order of animals called Mammalia, from the Latin for breast, because we and all other mammals from bears to shrews breast feed our young, and somehow this is not natural?

I have read many absurd statements in my life, but this may actually be the dumbest I have ever seen. In defense of this odd notion the author, Orit Avishai, offers this:

True, breast milk is produced organically by the human body, and for most of human history, feeding infants at the breast was a fact of life. “Natural” also implies a process that is untainted by civilization and society, yet infant feeding practices have changed throughout history and vary by culture. When we think about breast-feeding, we imagine an infant at her mother’s breast. But in previous eras, mothers who could afford to do so hired other women (poor women, slaves, immigrants) to breast-feed their babies. This was the “natural” order of those cultures.

No, "natural" does not imply "untainted by civilization and society." Suppose you say it is natural for humans to eat, but I counter that no, it is not natural because our diets are determined by our cultures, not biology. You would think I was either mad or an asshole who just wanted to start an argument. And, you know, we have managed to get around a lots of other bits of our natural heritage using technology or servants, but cars are still not natural and walking still is.

Breast feeding is as natural as eating, sleeping, or breathing, and that is pretty much all there is to say about it.

Still Beating the Drums for Torture

Charles Krauthammer has a column today on the Obama administration's use of drone strikes against terrorists. It is a strange column, because Krauthammer has no real problem with killing by drones. He just resents Obama's attempt to portray this as tough, since it is not nearly violent and bloody enough for Krauthammer's taste. Also, he claims to be bothered by the moral calculations of people who denounced Bush's torture regime but embrace drone killing. Which is, I would say, a good point; drone killings don't seem to me to be as clearly illegal as waterboarding, but they are still stupid and immoral, and I don't like the Obama political team's use of them in ads any better than Krauthammer does.

But here is where Krauthammer lost me:

Drone attacks are cheap — which is good. But the path of least resistance has a cost. It yields no intelligence about terror networks or terror plans.

One capture could potentially make us safer than 10 killings. But because of the moral incoherence of Obama’s war on terror, there are practically no captures anymore. What would be the point? There’s nowhere for the CIA to interrogate. And what would they learn even if they did, Obama having decreed a new regime of kid-gloves, name-rank-and-serial-number interrogation? 

THERE IS NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER THAT TORTURE WORKS. None. Experts at the FBI and British intelligence all swear up and down that "kid-gloves" interrogation works far better than abuse, and it is how we treated the high-ranking Nazis we captured during World War II. Krauthammer is still captured by the tough-guy fantasies that drove Bush and Cheney to adopt these methods in the first place.

Acting tough is not a policy. It is an emotional attitude, and a stupid one at that. In another part of the same column Krauthammer vents about how "weak" Obama has looked all around the world:

standing helplessly by as thousands are massacred in Syria; being played by Iran in nuclear negotiations, now reeling with the collapse of the latest round in Baghdad; being treated with contempt by Vladimir Putin, who blocks any action on Syria or Iran and adds personal insult by standing up Obama at the latter’s G-8 and NATO summits. 

We should intervene in Syria, at who knows what cost, toward who knows what outcome, because not doing so looks weak?  And who bloody cares if Vladimir Putin wants to strike a pose with Russian voters by refusing to meet with Obama? Substantively, US-relations are better than they have been in years.

Krauthammer's rhetoric tells you all you really need to know about torture as a policy. It is the gut reaction of people who can't control their fear and rage, so they vent it at whatever enemy comes to hand. It is an upwelling of hatred, a spasm of contempt for life's refusal to be neat and under control. An adult temper tantrum. It is not a rational solution to any problem. It is an evil act done for childish motives, and we should never stop condemning it.