Civil War in Syria

I have no special insight into the escalating violence in Syria, except to say that it inspires in me more fear than hope. Right now the picture of events there is still a strange mix. There are still peaceful protests in some areas, like the one that brought out these girls.

But the fighting continues to intensify and spread, looking more and more like a full-on civil war. The rebels have heavy weapons now, including rockets they used to shoot down a helicopter in Damascus last week, and they are killing government soldiers at an ever-increasing rate. Accounts are confused, but it seems the defense minister was assassinated by one of his own bodyguards, possibly using a suicide vest bomb.

I have trouble imagining a good outcome to this struggle. The Syrian government is thuggish, yes, and the economy stagnant, but what do the rebels have to offer? So far as I can tell, they seem mainly to represent Sunni Islam and rage over the lack of economic opportunity. I don't see much hope for democracy in Syria, a paranoid society riven by ethnic and religious tensions. So the likely outcome of a rebel victory would be a Sunni-dominated autocracy with restive Shi'ite and Christian minorities, sort of a mirror image of what is developing in Iraq. Is that worth the thousands of lives being lost? Sensing victory, the rebels are not likely to back down any time soon. But the government also shows no signs of bending. If this is fought out to the end, that will mean great slaughter amidst the ruins of Damascus and Aleppo. But how could the two sides negotiate? What would they even talk about? It looks bad.

Ghantakarna

From Nepalhomepage.com:

 This festival celebrates the exorcism of the mythical demon Ghantakarna. According to a local legend a savage by the name of Ghantakarna used to terrify the public by stealing their children and womenfolk. The demon made a grotesque sight with his body painted in red, blue, and black. He had a pair of bells on his ears so that, at every moment, he made a jangling noise. Because of these bells, he was called Ghanta (bell) Karna (ears). Ghanta Karna was a big bully and demanded money and other gifts be made to him by the villagers.

The rains came and went, but the farmers dared not to go out in fear of the ogre. There was a look of desolation on every farmer's face. But, succor came unexpectedly. A large number of frogs came to the place where the fearsome demon was staying and all of them started to croak. Ghantakarna got very agitated and tried to catch the frogs. But the clever frogs jumped ahead and continued to croak. They led him on to a swamp and then they jumped into the water. He too plunged into the water and was soon upto his ears in the mud. The frogs then swarmed all around his head and the demon sank to his death. Thus, the clever frogs were able to free the residents of the Valley from the tortures of Ghantakarna.

The festival of Gathemangal is celebrated towards the end of the Nepalese month of Shrawan. The festival is celebrated by acting out the legendary drama in the streets. To begin with, children from every neighborhood collect money from passerby, which is then used to make an effigy of the demon. While this effigy remains in the center of a rough tent-like structure erected from bamboo poles, one man impersonates Ghantakarna by smearing himself with paint and roaming the streets with a begging bowl asking for donations. At the end of the day, the person imitating Ghantakarna is placed on the bamboo poles, now taken down, and is dragged to a nearby river. This colorful festival, though celebrated mostly only in the Newar community, is especially fun-filled for children. They run around the effigy laughing gaily and enjoying them thoroughly.

Gathemangal was celebrated on July 17 this year. Most of the pictures online show people burning the effigies, rather than drowning, so I bet there is more than one version of how the demon was defeated.

Catherynne Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland

Catherynne Valente's delightful fairy tale lifted my spirits like few books I have read this decade. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making tells the story of a twelve-year-old girl named September, who is carried off from Omaha to Fairyland by a flying leopard and the Green Wind, there to see amazing things and have adventures befitting the heroine of such a tale. The plot is nothing remarkable, though it is fine enough. What makes the story remarkable is the words. The text is a gigantic wedding cake of language, studded with beautiful phrases and striking images, all overwrought to just the right amount for a fairy tale. In the future, I will judge all other attempts to write the language of fairy tales by this one. Consider this passage, which appears just after September crosses between worlds:

In Omaha, signposts are bright green with white writing, or occasionally white with black writing. September understood those signs and all the things they pointed to. But the signpost before her now was made of pale wind-bleached wood and towered above her: a beautiful carved woman with flowers in her hair, a long goat's tail winding around her legs, and a solemn expression on her sea-worn face. The deep gold light of the Fairyland sun played on her carefully whittled hair. She had wide, flaring wings, like September's swimming trophy. The wooden woman had four arms, each outstretched in a different direction, pointing with authority. On the inside of her easterly arm, pointing backward in the direction September had come, someone had carved in deep, elegant letters:

TO LOSE YOUR WAY

On the northerly arm, pointing up the tops of the cliffs, it said:

TO LOSE YOUR LIFE

On the southerly arm, pointing out to sea, it said:

TO LOSE YOUR MIND

And on the westerly arm, pointing up to a little headland and a dwindling of the golden beach, it said:

TO LOSE YOUR HEART

Or this, as September stares into a witches' cauldron:

September let go a long-held breath. She started into the roiling black-violet soup, thinking furiously. The trouble was, September didn't know what sort of story she was in. Was it a merry one or a serious one? How ought she to act? If it were merry, she might dash off after a Spoon, and it would all be a marvelous adventure, with funny rhymes and somersaults and a grant party with red lanterns at the end. But if it were a serious tale, she might have to do something important, something involving, with snow and arrows and enemies. Of course, we would like to tell her which. But no one may know the shape of the tale in which she moves. And, perhaps, we do not truly know what sort of beast it is, either. Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.

If you know a girl who loves stories, get her a copy of this right away. If you don't have a girl handy to share it with, and love stories yourself, read it anyway -- I won't tell anyone.

Guar Beans and Fracking, or, Globalization in Action

Globalization in action:  fracking, the controversial new technology for extracting oil and gas from hard rock, depends on powdered guar beans grown in Rajasthan, India.

Guar, a modest bean so hard that it can crack teeth, has become an unlikely global player, and dirt-poor farmers like Mr. Singh have suddenly become a crucial link in the energy production of the United States.

For centuries, farmers here used guar to feed their families and their cattle. There are better sources of nutrition, but few that grow in the Rajasthani desert, a land rich in culture but poor in rain. Broader commercial interest in guar first developed when food companies found that it absorbs water like a souped-up cornstarch, and a powdered form of the bean is now widely used to thicken ice cream and keep pastries crisp.

But much more important to farmers here was the recent discovery that guar could stiffen water so much that a mixture is able to carry sand sideways into wells drilled by horizontal fracturing, also known as fracking.

So Indian farmers are building new houses, and executives at drilling companies are worried about that a shortage of guar beans will force them to curtail operations.

The Drought of 2012

Middle America is experiencing the worst drought since the 1950s, with losses estimated at $50 billion.

Which means a banner year for farmers in Maryland the the northeast, since we have had plenty of rain and expect bumper harvests. Good thing I live here instead of the midwest, since nothing depresses me like drought. It's also worth noting that even with the worst drought in 50 years, we don't expect that any Americans will go hungry as a result.

Walk Like a Roman

From Mary Beard's review, in the May 11 TLS, of Walking in Roman Culture by Timothy O'Sullivan:

The key Latin word in incessus, which literally means "gait" or "how a person moves on their feet." It is now regularly translated as "bearing" or "demeanor"; but that removes all sense of movement from it. "He has a noble bearing" may seem to us a more "natural" thing to say than "He has a noble way of walking." It is not often what the Romans said, wrote or meant. In ancient Rome how you walked was a sign of who you were. . . . It could be an indication of paternity. when people wondered whether Cleopatra's child, young Caesarion, really was the son of Julius Caesar, they pointed to his walk (incessus) as much as to his facial features. Gait rain in families. . . . As O'Sullivan observers, "a family gait was no less distinctive than a family nose."

Walking was also closely related to morals and social status. Slaves moved quickly; in fact they did not so much walk as run (servus currens, "the running slave" being almost a tautology). One particular social climber, parodied in the comedy of 'flat-footed' Plautus, was advised to slow down and to ape the exaggerated stately pace of the Roman gentleman (the only pace possible, I imagine, when you were formally dressed up in a toga). But it was important not to go too slowly; for that was the mark of a woman, or an effeminate.

O'Sullivan also passes along the story of ancient Iberians who were baffled by the noble Roman habit of strolling around while talking or thinking. The Iberians had the idea that you only walked when you had somewhere to go, and otherwise you sat still. This interested me because American Indians were also puzzled by the way Europeans walked without purpose, and they found pacing back and forth to be absolutely hilarious. Indians were great walkers, perfectly willing to walk hundreds of miles when they had to, but they felt no need to waste energy walking nowhere. The habit of strolling seems to be a product of urban civilization.

Solanaceae: the Nightshade Family

Rishidev Chaudhuri explores the Nightshade family of plants:

The classical Old World members of Solanaceae are plants like deadly nightshade (belladonna), datura, mandrake, angel's trumpet and henbane; these are famously the plants of Hecate and the occult. They are striking examples of the weird intersection of the toxic, the medicinal and the religious that characterize our relationship with plants, and of the thin line between the altered states of revelation and transcendent experience and those of poisoning and death. These plants inherit their toxicity from a group of compounds called tropane alkaloids, specifically atropine (after Atropos, the oldest of the Three Fates and the one who snips the thread of life), scopalamine and hyoscyamine. These alkaloids reduce the activity of acetylcholine, one of the brain's primary neuromodulators, by competing with it to lock onto neural receptors (and hence are called anticholinergics). . . .

Anyhow, these plants show a number of physiological effects, generally related to inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system, and at low doses this allows for medical uses, including stimulating the heart and reducing various secretions, like saliva. They have been used to dilate pupils both for examination or for cosmetic reasons; pleased or aroused people have dilated pupils and the name “Belladonna” is said to come from women using these to dilate their pupils and make themselves more attractive. They have also been used for anesthesia and, along with opiates, as components of the “twilight sleep” induced in women during childbirth in the early 20th century.

More dramatically, though, these compounds cause powerful hallucinations. The hallucinations produced by anticholinergics are often contrasted with the hallucinations reported from psychedelics (think LSD and the drugs of the sixties); the former are described as “true” hallucinations, unfounded in sensory stimulus, as opposed to those caused by the psychedelics, which are typically thought of as distortions of sensory stimuli. Sometimes these substances are called deliriants, highlighting the nature of the intoxication. Despite their potential to produce altered states (and their legality), they seem to rarely be used recreationally. The hallucinations are reported as too strong and too terrifying; they can last for days and there is little euphoria. They are very clearly poisons. The only people who seem to use them are naïve teenagers looking to get high [e.g., jimsonweed around here] and brave people curious about various derangements of the senses. . . .

On the other hand, as their long association with witches attests, the members of Solanaceae have been used for spiritual and occult practices for quite a while. The “flying ointments” used by witches often contained Solanaceous plants and many people speculate that reports of flying and meeting with the Devil were the result of Solanaceae-induced delirium. Datura has also been reported in initiation and shamanic ceremonies in the Southwestern United States and Mexico (most famously in the writings of Carlos Castaneda, which are very entertaining but of dubious veracity), in various parts of Africa and in India. Like several other intoxicants, Datura is sacred to Shiva, and he is often pictured with a datura flower.

Orthanc in London is Complete

Renzo Piano's London skyscraper, which is officially known as The Shard but is really Orthanc, is complete. A laser light show was held last week to mark its opening.

The original.

Two Residents of Victorian Washington

George and Jane Viehmann, who lived on the 400 block of K Street Northwest in the 1870s and 1880s. He was a stonemason and tile layer.

Bellubrunus rothgaengeri

Bellubrunnus rothgaengeri is a new, exquisitely preserved pterosaur from the Solnhofen limestone beds of Germany.

As it might have looked while alive, 151 million years ago.

Falling Sand, Antelope Canyon

By Matt Walker. From National Geographic's 2012 travel photo contest.

Transbay

Despite its ongoing budget crisis, California continues to make big moves in public transportation. If the high speed rail line ever reaches San  Francisco --for reasons that escape me, the first segment to be built will be in the central valley, where nobody lives, rather than starting from LA -- it will pull into a gleaming new transportation hub to be called the Transbay Center.

Transbay is planned as a complete intermodal hub, with BART, commuter rail, buses, and intercity rail on four levels.

The building, designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, will be LEED certified, highly energy efficient, with a gray water recycling program, and a 5.4-acre park on top. Besides serving as a transportation hub, it is intended to spur more construction south of the old downtown, where the preservation of historic buildings and neighborhoods has led to a near complete ban on new building. The plan calls for now vacant land around the station to be built up with 2,600 apartments, 3 million square feet of office space and 100,000 square feet of retail.

It isn't cheap -- the total cost for the new station and extensions of the BART and Caltrain lines is about $4 billion -- but this this the kind of bold step that will keep our cities great.

Max Hastings, Inferno: the World at War, 1939-1945

Max Hastings is the author of several books about World War II, including a highly regarded account of Churchill's wartime years. When his publisher convinced him to write a one-volume history of the war, he re-read his two favorite such books (by Weinberg and Calvocoressi et al.) and then set out to write a book that did something different. He decided to focus less on what happened in the war, especially the nitty-gritty of military operations, and more on what people thought about what was happening: "This is a book chiefly about human experience." The basic narrative of the campaigns is here, but instead of more detail about the fighting Hastings gives us a rich array of contemporary quotations from people involved. He also gives more space to rather obscure parts of the war, such as the defense of India against Japanese attack in 1942, and the Arctic convoys to Russia. I enjoyed it very much. If, like me, you have already read a stack of books about the war, you will probably enjoy it as well, because it really does tell a different story than any book I know.

Not all of the quotations Hastings dug up are interesting, but some are fascinating. The letters of German soldiers allow us to follow their thinking all through the invasion of Russia in 1941, from the heady early days ("The pitiful hordes on the other side are nothing but felons who are driven by alcohol and the threat of pistols at their heads . . . a bunch of arseholes") to the frozen end ("I thought, 'I am going to die here, 21 years old, in the snow before Moscow'"). I find the story of what people thought about events to as important a part of the history as what happened, and I enjoyed these very much. Some observations rise to a profound level, like this reaction of a German woman to watching the defeated Wehrmacht stream back into Germany in 1945:

These days I keep noticing how my feelings towards men . . . are changing. I feel sorry for them; they seem so miserable and powerless. The weaker sex. Deep down we women are eperiencing a kind of collective disappointment. The Nazi world -- ruled by men, glorifying the strong man -- is beginning to crumble, and with it the myth of Man.

Was the humiliation their men suffered in the war one reason why the next wave of feminism was led by Germans, French, Italians and Norwegians? Other passages simply remind us that events seemed different to those living through them than they do in hindsight

World War II was, as Hastings says, the most awful event in human history. The slaughter was so immense that it can be approached only through statistics, and Hastings has a good sample. The current thinking is that at least 60 million people died in the war and the associated massacres and famines, 27,000 people every day for five years. The Poles and the Yugoslavs suffered the highest proportional losses, followed by the Russians, who suffered the most casualties overall (at least 27 million, including 300,000 shot by the NKVD for cowardice, desertion, or "anti-soviet activity.") The Russians and the Germans did most of the fighting; I thought one of the most illuminating numbers Hastings offers is this one: of the 5 million German soldiers who died in the war, 4.5 million were killed by the Russians.

Hastings has thought long about the war and read a staggering amount about it, and he has many interesting things to say. One of my favorites was this observation, made about Pearl Harbor and its aftermath:

It was a conspicuous feature of the war that again and again, dramatic changes of circumstance unmanned the victims of assault. The British and French in May 1940, the Russians in June 1941, even the Germans in Normandy in June 1944, had every reason to anticipate enemy action, yet responded inadequately when this came.

The fury of a modern military assault did indeed unman most combatants, especially the first time they were attacked. The Japanese forces that easily overran Malaya and the Philippines were outnumbered by the defenders, as were the Germans who attacked Russia. But as long as the attackers moved with enough speed and aggression, the minds of the defenders simply could not keep pace with the fury of lightning war. Of all the combatants, only the Finns in 1940 responded well from the first time they were attacked. All the others took years to adapt to twentieth-century combat.

Inferno is a terrific book, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the war, whether it would be your hundredth World War II book or your first.

Mel Chin, Cross for the Unforgiven

Bad Blood at the FDA

A decade's worth of trouble continues at the Food and Drug Administration. When Bush II's people came in, they believed that scientists at the FDA were too hostile toward drug and instrument companies, leading to years of unnecessary delays in the approval of vital drugs and techniques.They tried to make the FDA's procedures less adversarial and more cooperative. They also slashed the FDA's budget for doing its own studies, leaving it completely dependent on studies done by the manufacturers. This reform was done in a way that bitterly alienated the FDA's scientists and created a terrible rift in the organization. Dozens of key people retired, and many were not replaced. Several people I know spoke of the agency being "destroyed." For the last decade the FDA has replaced the Library of Congress as the federal agency with the worst relations between its managers and staff.

Now the latest chapter has made the NY Times, where Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane report that the agency's managers have been spying on scientists they deem unreliable:

A wide-ranging surveillance operation by the Food and Drug Administration against a group of its own scientists used an enemies list of sorts as it secretly captured thousands of e-mails that the disgruntled scientists sent privately to members of Congress, lawyers, labor officials, journalists and even President Obama, previously undisclosed records show. . . .

Moving to quell what one memorandum called the “collaboration” of the F.D.A.’s opponents, the surveillance operation identified 21 agency employees, Congressional officials, outside medical researchers and journalists thought to be working together to put out negative and “defamatory” information about the agency.

The agency, using so-called spy software designed to help employers monitor workers, captured screen images from the government laptops of the five scientists as they were being used at work or at home. The software tracked their keystrokes, intercepted their personal e-mails, copied the documents on their personal thumb drives and even followed their messages line by line as they were being drafted, the documents show.

The extraordinary surveillance effort grew out of a bitter dispute lasting years between the scientists and their bosses at the F.D.A. over the scientists’ claims that faulty review procedures at the agency had led to the approval of medical imaging devices for mammograms and colonoscopies that exposed patients to dangerous levels of radiation.

The scientists have sued the agency, and they are likely to win. Communications between Federal employees and Congress are protected by law, and these men were pursuing a formal grievance against their managers, which made any emails pertaining to that case confidential as well. More important, no organization can function with this level of mistrust, and that means the FDA is not protecting the citizens in the way it is supposed. Obama's people have let this slide for too long, and he needs to send somebody to clean this mess up.

Insulin, Rhinoceros Beetles, and Hard Medicine

Just a little note about the big horns grown by rhinoceros beetles and some other bugs: the hormone responsible for the growth of these big structures seems to be insulin. Which is interesting because it reminds us that our key hormones do a lot of different things, and therefore that any medical treatment that involves manipulating them is going to have lots of side effects.

Antico: Pier Jacopo Alari de Bonacolsi

Italian sculptor Pier Jacopo Alari de Bonacolsi (1455-1528) was known as "Antico" because of his knowledge of, and love for, ancient sculpture. In the employ of the princely Gonzaga family of Mantua, he crafted exquisite miniature copies of classical works in sumptuous bronze. The Frick gallery has a show of his work, which you can read about here. These copies helped to define the canon of famous classical works, since few people could see the originals.

Green Mutants

Early this spring I noticed that I had three self-seeded purple coneflower plants coming up, and I was pleased. I love purple coneflowers, and the one that sprouted last year was lovely. This year's crop is another story.

Purple coneflowers are supposed to look like this. They're purple, see, and sort of cone shaped. And the domesticated versions are not much different from the wild ones, which is why they can self-seed successfully. But no, mine decided to be more green than purple.

Not to mention hideously misshapen. Whatever you want to call that shape, it certainly isn't a cone. What's up with these flowers?

"Free Enterprise" and the Real Issues Facing America

The Post is running an op-ed by Arthur Brooks called "Five Myths about Free Enterprise" which I think makes a mishmash of the economics and the politics. One of his myths is "free enterprise hurts the poor," and he points out that people in capitalist countries are much richer than people in India and Africa. Ok, sure, capitalism is better than peasant agriculture, or Maoism.

The thing is, we do not have in America, Europe or Japan anything like a pure "free enterprise system," and the alternative to our current system would not be peasant agriculture or socialism. What we have is a "mixed economy," with a very large public sector, legalized unions, and extensive regulation. The political conflict in America is not about whether to have a free enterprise system or socialism; we are not going to have either. The argument is about the right mix of government and private action, and about how taxes should be apportioned. America's poor made their greatest economic progress during the period when our government exercised the most economic control, and when unions were strongest, from 1940 to 1980. Since we turned back toward a less regulated, less unionized system in the 1980s, the poor have been treading water while the rich get ever richer. Some level of free enterprise is good for the poor, but unlimited free enterprise is not.

I think this is an important point because many forces in American politics want us to see our choices in apocalyptic terms. The argument that Obamacare is "socialism," for example, when any real socialist could only roll his eyes at its protections for insurance companies and drug companies. Within the whole range of possible economic systems, the difference between Obama and Mitt Romney is actually pretty small. I think it matters, but it is an argument about how to tinker with the system, not about fundamental change. When Republicans respond to every new regulation or tax increase with paeans to "free enterprise", they are setting up a false choice that has nothing to do with the issues we face now.

The Paisley Caves and the First North Americans

In the news today, more evidence of early human settlement at the Paisley Caves in the dry uplands of central Oregon. Since excavations resumed at the caves in 2002, fascinating finds have been made every year. That humans settled here at the end of the Ice Age seems well established, given the discovery of extinct camel bones in the trash around a hearth. But how early, and what culture is represented here, has been fiercely disputed.

Back in 2008, the excavators shook up the archaeological world by announcing that DNA from coprolites -- fossil turds -- shown them to be of human origin, and that radiocarbon dating showed them to be around 14,200 years old. The Clovis culture, the oldest North American culture that everyone accepts, first appeared around 13,500 years ago. So the basal layers at the Paisley Caves seem to be more evidence of "pre-Clovis" humans in North America.

The new data published this year includes 190 additional radiocarbon dates, many of them in the same circa 14,000 BP range, and also diagnostic stone tools. The tools are quite important, because the earlier finds from the caves included lots of animal bone and numerous obsidian flakes but few tools, making it difficult to establish the culture of the residents. The new finds (above) are indisputably related to the "western stemmed" tradition, which is found across the Great Basin and was known to be quite early. If the analysis of the Paisley Caves data is correct, the widely distributed western stemmed tradition is at least as old as Clovis and possibly older. The new dates are also important, because the earlier dates were on materials from rodent burrows or other disturbances, and some people questioned the validity of the associations between the dated carbon and human artifacts. The new dates, the investigators say, are from much more intact contexts.

The site is certainly a very exciting one. But I dispute the "nyah-nyah to Clovis first" attitude of some of the pronouncements I have seen. This is probably the four thousandth time that some archaeologist has announced that his data conclusively refutes the Clovis first theory, and I still know lots of Clovis first believers. The reason the theory endures is that the extraordinarily rapid spread of Clovis -- across most of North America within 200 years, to Tierra del Fuego within 400 -- seems to demand a continent nearly empty of humans. How else could it have spread so far and so fast? Clovis seems to completely dominate wherever it appears, and all later cultures are descended from it; if there were earlier peoples, what happened to them? And, the genetic evidence points strongly to a single founder population for most Native Americans.

Clovis can't possibly have been the culture of the very first people in the New World,  because it is not found in Asia or Alaska and therefore originated in North America. As the Paisley cave excavators note, the western stemmed tradition is more like the stone tools of northeastern Asia than Clovis is. But I think overwhelming evidence still demands that Clovis come very early in the sequence of occupation. Radiocarbon dating is a fabulous tool, but my own experience with it is too shaky for me to ever accept any date that can't be fitted into a coherent narrative of human movements and interactions. (You can take multiple dates from the same animal and have them come back 2,000 years apart.)

I can fit the Paisley Cave data into a narrative that makes some sense to me. People arrive from Asia around 14,000 years ago, using stone tools much  like the western stemmed tradition. One group of them heads for the west coast. Another heads south, possibly to Texas (which has produced the oldest Clovis dates), where they develop the Clovis spear point and a culture that impels them to spread far and wide across the landscape. I'm no expert on the population genetics of this, so I am not sure how much time might have elapsed between the entry and the spread of Clovis. But I still believe that there can't have been many people in the continent when Clovis began its spread, and therefore that there is an upper limit to that time. Five thousand years, I think, is much too long, and even one thousand seems to me to be pushing it.

Then again, maybe the Paisley Cave data will go the way of so many other pre-Clovis claims. Time, I suppose, will tell.

Sad, Sad, Sad

From former FBI director Louis Freeh's report on Penn State's responsibility for Jerry Sandusky's crimes:

Our most saddening and sobering finding is the total disregard for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims by the most senior leaders at Penn State. The most powerful men at Penn State failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect the children who Sandusky victimized. [Joe Paterno, former Penn State President Graham B. Spanier, former Athletic Director Tim Curley and campus police chief Gary Schultz] never demonstrated, through actions or words, any concern for the safety and well-being of Sandusky’s victims until after Sandusky’s arrest. . . .

Taking into account the available witness statements and evidence, it is more reasonable to conclude that, in order to avoid the consequences of bad publicity, the most powerful leaders at Penn State University . . . repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky’s child abuse from the authorities, the Board of Trustees, Penn State community, and the public at large.

It is a sad fact about humanity that a lack of accountability leads to terrible behavior. When people think they can keep their actions secret, and avoid any blame, they will do almost anything. Protected by the aura of Penn State football, these men acted disgracefully, and many suffered terrible harm.

Our Esteemed Leaders

This week, the House of Representatives voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act for the 33rd time, demonstrating one reason why this Congress has the lowest approval rating in history.

Baubles: the 18th-Century Treasures of Johann Christian Neuber

Images from an exhibit at the Frick Gallery of jeweled baubles by Johann Christian Neuber (1736-1808), made for the Saxon court in the 1760s and 1770s. More at the Times.

A small table decorated with many different semi-precious stones.

The last gasp of the Old Regime was accompanied by many fabulous trinkets.

William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: a Year in Delhi

Back in 1989, young British writer William Dalrymple spent a year in Delhi. He then wrote a book about his experience, which appeared in 1993. Last month, I chanced upon it at the used book store in Dupont Circle and snapped it up. It's wonderful, and I recommend it highly. Dalrymple is a graceful writer and a very determined explorer of Indian life, and there is something interesting or amusing on almost every page of this book. My favorite parts are the conversations he records, which capture the flavor of Indian English and the personalities of the many people he meets. At a Muslim wedding, he comments to an acquaintance that the groom looks miserable:

"This is our custom," said Dr. Haidar. "We think that a groom must look little bit shy."
"He certainly doesn't look as if he is enjoying himself much."
"Maybe he is thinking that today he will loose his freedom. After this day he will be having to obey his wife."
"I thought Muslim men were always the unchallenged heads of their households."
"This thing is not true," said Dr. Haidar. "In all countries, irrespective of religion, behind the scenes the woman are ruling the men. How long have you been married?"
"One year."
"After a while you will understand," said Dr. Haidar, shaking his head sadly.

Dalrymple spends much of the book investigating Delhi's history, especially its glory days in the 17th century, under the Mughal emperors. He learns many fascinating things, and finds many survivals of the old ways, such as Sufi fakirs, eunuchs, practitioners of Galenic medicine, and men who converse with djinns. There is a sadness to this exploration, because modern Delhi is cut off from its past by the chasm of partition. In 1947, more than 300,000 Muslims fled Delhi for Pakistan, and nearly a million Sikhs and Hindus from the Punjab moved in. The old courtly culture of the city was largely destroyed, and to find men who remember the old ways and speak the city's unique dialect of Urdu Dalrymple had to travel to Karachi in Pakistan. Sometimes I wished Dalrymple had spent his year in a city with more continuity in its past.

Still, it's a fine book, and I recommend it to anyone curious about India's past and present.

Herbig-Haro 110

A giant jet of gas shout out by a new star, shown in a Hubble photo. Most of these come in opposed pairs, and nobody is sure why the mate of this one can't be seen.

The Practical Effects of Obamacare

Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin has an Op-Ed in the Post today on the practical effects of Obamacare in which he claims:

● 100,000 people will be dropped by their employer-sponsored health insurance;
● 59 percent of people who buy their own health insurance will experience an average premium increase of 31 percent;
● 150,000 people will stop buying health insurance in the private sector and will instead become dependent on the government and taxpayers;
● Between 2014 and 2019, Obamacare could cost Wisconsin taxpayers $1.12 billion; after all federal aid and tax credits are applied, the state’s portion of the bill will be $433 million; and
● Approximately 122,000 parents, caretakers and pregnant women with an income of more than 133 percent of the federal poverty level will no longer be eligible for Medicaid.

It’s important to go beyond these facts and understand what they really mean for those of us who live in the Badger State. Young people will be hit hard with premium increases. Those between 19 and 29 years old who have individual insurance will experience an average premium increase of $1,631 per year. A family of four that does not qualify for a subsidy can expect a 28 percentincrease — from $8,528 to $10,912. For those who are covered by the small-employer group market, the average premium increase will be 15 percent.

To which one can respond as follows:

● More than a million Americans have been dropped by employer-sponsored health plans since 2008 without the Affordable Care Act; the exact number is disputed, but nobody disputes that an ever shrinking number of employers choose to offer full care to their employees. This "unraveling" of the employer-based insurance system is one reason why the ACA is necessary.
● Nobody knows what effect the ACA will have on insurance premiums. What happened in Massachusetts under Romney's essentially identical system was that initial big increases, because of the minimum coverage levels in the law, were followed by a flattening of the cost curve, so that now Massachusetts health insurance costs are no higher than those in nearby states
● Nobody knows how many people will stop buying health insurance. Some cut rate plans will no longer be available, but those plans don't provide a level of coverage adequate to insure against a real health disaster, leaving the people who have them vulnerable to bankruptcy and the rest of us liable for their costs.
● In generous states such as Wisconsin and Connecticut, a few people may lose eligibility for Medicaid, although the White House numbers are much smaller than Walker's. But this would be much more than made up for the millions of new people covered in less generous states.

Really we don't know how Obamacare will play out. We don't know what will happen to premiums, whether the exchanges will work as advertised, whether conservative governors will be able to block them altogether,  whether the cost controls will work, and lots of other things. But we know that the current system is not working. The percentage of Americans with health insurance has gone down every year of this century, and costs have gone up rapidly. What is Governor Walker's solution?

My preferred approach would be a single-payer system with rigid cost controls, but I recognize that Americans are not likely to accept this. With that off the table, some combination of insurance mandates and pools is all but inevitable. A system in which people see whatever doctor they want and get whatever care they think they need, with someone else picking up the tab, is simply not sustainable.

More Data on American Indian Genetics, or, How to Miss the Point of Your Own Data

The New York Times has a story today, by the reliably wrong-headed Nicholas Wade, on the genetic history of American Indians. The headline is, Earliest Americans Arrived in Waves, DNA Study Finds. This sounds like support for a model of multiple ancient migrations. Actually the study found that almost all Native Americans are descended from one group of immigrants from Asia -- the same migration that others have dated to around 15,000 years ago. The other "waves" are the small group of Athapascans or Na-Dene, whose late arrival is attested by their strange language and their own oral history, and Eskimos. As you can see from the map above, the Na-Dene (except for the Navajo) and the Eskimos are the closest groups to Asia, which is where you would expect late arrivals to be. I suppose it is nice that the genetic data supports the model derived from linguistics, archaeology, and oral history, but really there just isn't any news here.

This study actually adds more support to the reigning orthodoxy, the theory that most Indians descend from a single group of migrants who arrived around the end of the Ice Age. I started to write a post fulminating at Nicholas Wade for passing on this incoherence, but I see from the abstract that the problem originates with the geneticists who wrote the original Science piece. Neither they nor Wade seem to know that there is a raging debate about how many ancient migrations there were, and whether any came from Europe, and whether they left Asia 15,000 or 25,000 years ago, and so on. To anyone who follows that debate, the Times headline implies the opposite of what the story ends up saying. Aren't science journalists supposed to know about this sort of thing? I have gotten used to the abysmal ignorance of most geneticists when it comes to archaeology, but shouldn't the editors of Science know?

Wealth and the Generations in America

Great chart from Noah Kristula-Green, based on data from Pew, showing how likely Americans born in each quintile of income are to end up in each quintile. As you can see, there is quite a lot of mobility, except that 41% of those born at the bottom end up at the bottom and 41% of those born at the top end up at the top.

On a more personal level, I see that children born into the 4th quintile have an 11 percent chance of ending up at the bottom, where some of my own offspring seem to be headed. Entirely by their own choice, I might note. One thing missing from most discussions of income mobility in America is this element of choice. I could easily have ended up in the top quintile had I really wanted to, but I didn't, and there are plenty of middle class kids who slide down the ladder because they refuse to pay the price of middle class membership.

A New Climate History for Europe

A team of European researchers has just released this graph of Europe's climate history over the past 2000 years, claiming that it is the most accurate yet.

One interesting thing about this graph is that it is really quite smooth; the largest variations are less than 1 degree Celsius from the mean. Look at the bars in the background, though, which represent actual data points with their error bars, and you see that there is a lot more variation there. The method used in this study results in a lot of averaging, and some places in Europe no doubt experienced more extreme changes.

U Camelopardalis

U Camelopardalis is an aging carbon star that ejects spherical shells of gas every few thousand years. This Hubble image shows the star surrounded by its ejecta.

A cameleopard is, of course, a giraffe, and now that I think about it I am going to launch a movement to bring back the old, much more evocative name -- cameleopards forever!