Kumi Yamashita

Japanese-born, New York-based artist who has worked in a variety of unusual media. Her shadow art pieces are among the best I have seen.

And I've never seen anything like these portraits made with nails and string, which she calls "constellations."

She also does rubbings -- this drawing was made by rubbing over a credit card -- and makes portraits by removing threads from old pieces of cloth. She even made at least one work by walking on a sheet in different sorts of drity shoes.

Another thread portrait, and a close-up showing the method.

More shadow pieces. The stuff is all very creative, but it has something of a gimmicky feel to me. I would love to see what she can do with pencil and paper.

Was World War II Predictable?

One of the things that struck me while reading Max Hastings' Inferno was how many people accurately predicted the course of the war. Consider this letter from John Steinbeck, written just after Pearl Harbor:

The attack, whatever it may have gained from a tactical point of view, was a failure in that it solidified the country. But we'll lose lots of ships for a while.

Spot on. Of course, many other people predicted that the United States would crush Japan, including Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto and the whole American leadership.

What about the European war? Hastings describes a conference held in Berlin in late November, 1941. Chaired by Fritz Todt, the chief of armaments production, it included the top executives of German heavy industry and leading Nazis. It concluded that winning the war against Russia was "no longer possible." Having failed to win a quick knock-out, Germany could not prevail in a long conflict because its industrial production was not up to the job. Todt advised Hitler that he should seek a negotiated end to the conflict.

Did the industrial czars know, or were they just guessing? Governments produce lots of reports, and some on them are bound to be right. As Hastings says, the military leaders of the US and Britain went on thinking all through 1942 that Germany would defeat the Soviets. Other westerners disagreed, including George Orwell, who thought Hitler had signed his death warrant by attacking Russia before finishing Britain.

I find myself wondering if, perhaps, World War II really was more predictable than other events. Because it was a total war, it came down in the end to who had the most factories and the most men. The Germans outfought and out-thought the Soviets at almost every level, but it the end they were crushed by the sheer number of Russian soldiers and tanks. In 1942, Germany produced 4,800 armored vehicles, while the Soviets produced 24,000 and the Americans, still warming up, 25,000. The entry of America on the allied side made the imbalance severe; in 1944, the United States produced twice as many military aircraft as Germany and Japan combined.

This kind of analysis depends, though, on accurate knowledge. One reason the British and Americans over-rated Hitler's chances in Russia was that they consistently over-rated German industrial capabilities. Hitler convinced much of the world that Germany was a hyper-modern industrial powerhouse, whereas really the efficiency of its heavy industries lagged behind American and Soviet standards, and much of its agriculture was still in the hands of peasants. His own armaments chiefs had a clearer view of German industry.

I tend to think that given the alignment of the two sides, and the determination of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt to fight through to the end, the result of the war was never really in doubt, and Hitler could only have prevailed by finding some way to fight his enemies one at a time.

Mt. Rainier

By Craig Tuttle, from a National Geographic feature on US National Parks.

Land Reform in Zimbabwe

The Times is running a story by Lydia Polgreen on the aftermath of the violent land reform undertaken  in Zimbabwe by President Robert Thug-4-Life Mugabe. This got the worst possible press in America and Britain, and most of us, including me, had the impression that most of the land seized from white farmers was given to Mugabe's cronies, who so badly mishandled it that yields plummeted, sending the country into economic crisis. 

Some land was given to regime cronies, who certainly did mismanage it, and there was an economic crisis. But most of the seized land was given to poor blacks, and after a rough start some of them are doing very well. Polgreen's article focuses on tobacco, Zimbabwe's most profitable crop. After falling from 500 million pounds before the reform to 100 million, the crop has rebounded to 330 million pounds, and the quality is very high. Considering that most of these farmers have only been in the business for a few years, that is fairly impressive. The reform has also created a large class of black landowners who seem very happy with their lot and feel that they have escaped from the oppression of colonialism.

The issues of justice here are, I submit, very complex. None of the white farmers who had land seized had actually stolen it from blacks; they inherited it, or else purchased in the 1980s or 1990s, when Zimbabwean land seemed like a good investment. They created Zimbabwe's only modern economic sector and helped raise the country's standard of living above that of its neighbors. They worked hard and built something very valuable. Not to mention that the people who suffered the most when the white farmers lost half their land were their black employees, who lost their jobs.

On the other hand the land was stolen from blacks, whoever it was who did it, and before the land reform many Zimbabweans burned with resentment that whites controlled almost all of the valuable land in the country. A century of colonialism and racism had led to a gigantically unfair distribution of wealth in he country, and how could a black government allow that situation to continue? Various attempts to redistribute land by helping blacks to buy it ("willing buyer, willing seller") had next to no impact. It was only after Mugabe started his radical, blatantly illegal seizure program after 2000 that significant amounts of land passed into black hands.

Even the people who support the idea of land reform admit that Mugabe mismanaged it, besides carrying it out with needless violence and destruction. But was the idea a bad one? I don't know.

My most serious thought on the matter is that while many Zimbabweans want to be small farmers now, it is not an occupation with much future in it. Peasants can never really join the modern world. And they tend to have big families, so that even if these farmers are doing well in the first generation, their children will likely have to make do with less and less land per person, until they are struggling to feed themselves. (Zimbabwe's population growth crashed from around 3% to below zero during the economic crisis, but now it has rebounded to about 1.5% and rising.) To the extent that land reform has deepened the attachment of black Zimbabweans to small farming, it may have retarded their economic progress in the long term.

Freedom, though, means letting people have what they want now. Maybe these farmers will help lead Zimbabwe into a new era of economic growth and less racial unfairness. We can always hope.

Albrecht Dürer's Six Knots

There is No Voter Fraud Problem in America

Former Florida Governor Charlie Christ has written a powerful op-ed against Republican efforts to keep people from voting:

The right to choose our leaders is at the heart of what it means to be an American. Our history books are full of examples to the contrary. When we send independent observers to monitor for voter fraud in banana republics, we derive authority from our self-regard as the ideal. When we hear of corrupt voting practices in foreign countries, where the ideal of democracy is nothing more than lip service, we feel good about ourselves. It’s time to look right under our noses. It’s happening here at home. And it’s our responsibility to honestly assess the root of the problem — which requires doing so with as little partisan bias as we believe belongs in the administration of our elections.

We can’t be surprised every time it turns out that politics are involved in our politics. But neither can we be silent when our democracy is threatened in its name. There are lines that should not be crossed; meddling with voting rights is one of them. It is un-American and it is beneath us.

There is no voter fraud problem in America. Every study that has ever been done of the question shows tiny rates of fraud, not enough to change any election result. I think what drives Republican fears about voter fraud is a sense that "real Americans" are somehow being robbed of their country. They think that they -- conservative, white, native-born Christians -- are the real majority, or at least the moral heart of the country. When they see someone for whom they have no respect elected President, like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, they can only think that the proper course of things has been distorted or perverted. Since their friends all voted for the Republican, they think that all real Americans did, and therefore that something must have gone awry. The election must have been stolen. Whom to blame, now that there are no big-city machines? Why, it must be illegal immigrants.

Fertilizing the Ocean to Fight Climate Change

Recent experiments in fertilizing the ocean have been focused, not on creating ecosystems, but on absorbing carbon from the atmosphere and sinking it to the bottom. The latest publication in the field describes an experiment undertaken in 2004 by mainly German researchers aboard the research vessel Polarstern. They mixed 14 tons of iron sulfate with sea water and spread it over 167 square km (65 sq miles) of open ocean, then monitored the ensuing plankton bloom for 37 days.

The effect of this intervention was dramatic; 14 tons of iron sulfate is a tiny amount, and yet it led to a bloom lasting weeks. According to the researchers' calculations, "Each atom of added iron pulled at least 13,000 atoms of carbon out of the atmosphere" by encouraging plankton to grow and photosynthesize. The tricky part was figuring out what happened to the carbon after the plankton died, and it seems the publication of the results was held up for years while the scientists argued about it. Their final conclusion is that at least half of the carbon soaked up by the plankton sank into the deep ocean, below 1000 meters, where it will probably stay for centuries.

So the notion of creating oceanic plankton blooms to soak up carbon has some potential. But I am still fascinated with using this technology to turn nearly empty stretches of ocean into highly productive ecosystems, which might sink some carbon but would also fill with fish and whales.

Making Billions from Dangerous Drugs

Great Washington Post story today, by Peter Whoriskey, on the anti-anemia drugs sold as Epogen, Procrit and Aranesp, which are artificial versions of the hormone erythropoietin. The drugs were intended to help patients on dialysis or certain chemotherapy regimes, which cause anemia and used to require regular transfusions of red blood cells. And apparently the drugs do help some patients. But they don't help everyone, and they have serious side effects. They got to be blockbuster best-sellers mostly because of clever marketing and intensive lobbying:

Americans might like to think that doctors focus on only their health. But physicians and hospitals have to pay the bills, too, and, in some cases, the more they treat a patient, the more they earn. This was especially true in the case of the anemia drugs: The bigger the dose, the more they made. Unlike medications that a patient picks up at the store, drugs administered by a physician, as these were, can yield a profit for doctors if there is a “spread” — a difference between the price they pay for the drug and the price they charge patients.

In this case, drugmakers worked diligently to make sure that doctors had an incentive to give large doses — that the spread was large. They offered discounts to practices that dispensed the drug in big volumes. They overfilled vials, adding as much as 25 percent extra, allowing doctors to further widen profit margins. Most critical, however, was the company’s lobbying pressure, under which Congress and Medicare bureaucrats forged a system in which doctors and hospitals would be reimbursed more for the drug than they were paying for it.

The markup that doctors, clinics and hospitals received on the drugs given to Medicare patients reached as high as 30 percent, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, a group that advises Congress. And the markup on doses given to patients covered by private insurance was even larger.

The result is that the drug was used for more and more conditions, at higher and higher doses, doses that we now know cause fatal heart disease.

Americans have a weirdly naive faith in their doctors, but this is just one of many cases in which "health care bureaucrats" do know more than most doctors, and their recent efforts to reduce the use of these drugs have saved billions of dollars and many lives.

The Gairsoppa's Silver Comes Up

Last year I wrote about the discovery of the wreck of the SS Gairsoppa, a freighter that was sunk by a U-boat while carrying more than 90 tons of silver from India to Britain in 1941. Now Odyssey Marine has begun recovering the silver, and they say they have moved 48 tons to a secure facility in Britain. Odyssey has an agreement with the British government, which owns the silver and will get 20 percent of whatever Odyssey brings up.

Sixty Birds in One Rug

This Persian Kermanshah "Tree of Life" carpet, probably 1850 to 1875 CE, is said to show sixty different birds. It's for sale, too.

Prather's Alley, Washington, DC

For an upcoming archaeological project in the District of Columbia, my colleague Jason and I have been researching a little place called Prather's Alley. Many blocks in Washington developed along the lines of the one shown in the map, above, from 1888. There are houses fronting on the streets, but also a little neighborhood fronting on the alley in the middle of the block. (Square 516, shown above, is south of K Street between 4th and 5th Streets NW.)

These alleys had an unsavory reputation. They were hidden from the traffic on the streets, and from the prying eyes of the police, and most of Washington's whore houses, gambling dens, and illegal pubs were in alleys. The non-criminal residents of the alleys were mostly poor black laborers and their families. Renderings of the city intended for sale to middle people, like this 1884 oblique view of Square 516, often omitted the alley houses altogether. (Here you can glimpse a couple of houses in the middle of the block, but most are hidden by trees.

Prather's Alley was no exception; in fact, it seems to have been one of Northwest Washington's centers for crime and vice. The first houses on the alley were probably built in the 1850s, and by 1862 it was appearing regularly in the newspaper. In September of that year the police raided what one newspaper called "the notorius den of Eliza Crittenden in Prather's Alley." According to this reporter, Both "black and white" girls were arrested: Mary Eaton, Mary Jane Holley, Sarah Bonds, Annie Eaton and Elizabeth McManus. This Eliza had a long career, partly, one suspects, because she kept changing her name; just two months later she appeared in the press as Eliza Miller, still operating a "bawdy house" in Prather's Alley.

Perhaps you have wondered, in some idle moment, what prostitutes say when nosy census takers come and ask them, "what is your profession?" The girls of Prather's Alley were not ashamed to tell the truth.

A few more Prather's Alley news items, all from the National Republican:

January 29, 1862

 February 5, 1862.

July 27, 1864.

Ancient Shoes

From Catlow Cave, Oregon, 9,300 years old. Made of sagebrush bark.

From the Arnold Research Cave, Missouri, 8,000 years old.

Another shoe from the Arnold Cave. The shoes from this cave were quite diverse, suggesting that a variety of styles were in use over the thousand years when the cave was being visited by Indians.

From Armenia, the oldest known sewn leather shoe, 5,500 years old.

The shoes of Ötzi the "ice man", about 5000 years old. These consisted of an inner net of grass twine, surrounded by grass insulation, surrounded by deerskin, all attached to a bearskin sole.

Replica of Ötzi's shoes.

Shoe made of linden tree bark from a Neolithic lake village under Zurich, Switzerland, 5000 years old.

Egyptian sandal from Sedment, ca. 3,400 years old.

Tutankhamun's sandals.

Early Iron Age shoe from a salt mine in Hallstatt, Austria, 2,700 years old.

The golden shoes of the Hochdorf Prince, a celtic chieftain of ca. 2500 years ago.

Shoe from one of the frozen tombs in the Altai, ca. 2400 years ago.

Roman shoes from York, England, ca. 1800 years old.

The Romney Family, Financial Engineering, and Rising Inequality

Jacob Weisberg at Slate:

Romney’s Bain career is a story about rising inequality. It’s telling that George Romney, Mitt’s father, made around $200,000 through most of the years he ran American Motors Corporation. Doing work that clearly created jobs, the elder Romney paid an effective tax rate that averaged 37 percent. His son made vastly more running a corporate chop shop in an industry that does not appear to create jobs overall. In 2010, Mitt Romney paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent on $21.7 million in investment income—around 14 times as much as his father in inflation-adjusted terms. This difference encapsulates the change from corporate titans who lived in the same world as the people who worked for them, in an America with real social mobility, to a financial overclass that makes its own separate rules and has choked off social mobility. The elder Romney wasn’t embarrassed to explain what he’d done as a businessman or to release his tax returns. . . .

It’s not clear that private equity—like other forms of financial innovation—is good for America. You’d think that if private equity made businesses more efficient and valuable overall, there’d be clear evidence to support it, but there isn’t. Private equity firms earn most of their money through financial engineering. A big share of their returns comes from “tax arbitrage”—figuring out how to exploit loopholes to pay less to the government. Because interest is a deductible business expense, debt financing means they often pay little or no corporate tax. Private equity’s reliance on leverage can also magnify short-term earnings without leaving the companies they manage more valuable overall. One legal but dubious practice that private equity firms engage in is paying large “special dividends” out of borrowed money. As Jim Surowiecki of the New Yorker has written, “These dividends created no economic value—they just redistributed money from the company to the private-equity investors.” 

When people say that attacking what Romney did at Bain is attacking "Capitalism," they are missing the point. Capitalism existed for centuries before anyone dreamed up the crazy financial schemes of 1980 to 2008. Those schemes depend on exploiting the details of laws governing taxes, pensions, corporate governance, and so on, and they also have nothing to do with making things that people want. They are not capitalism, but a sort of meta-capitalism that leeches vitality out of the real thing. If a way can be found to ban them we absolutely should. Everyone would be better off except a small class of financial vampires.

The Paradox of Rural Development

There are two kinds of rural areas: those that are emptying out because young people can't find jobs, and those that do have jobs and are in turmoil over the outsiders coming in to take them. Consider this story from North Dakota, in the midst of a minor oil boom:

Nelson and his family have leased out rights they do own, and his share of the royalties from four wells comes to about $8,000 a month. It’s a modest sum, he said, for the headaches that go with it. He’s squabbled with oil companies over drilling waste, a saltwater spill and decades-old storage tanks eaten away by chemicals. “I’d give it all back if I could for all the trouble it’s been,” said Nelson, 48.

Above all, he misses a time when people didn’t lock their doors and knew all their neighbors. “I don’t like what it’s done to our communities and lifestyle,” he said. “We had a good life, and now it’s gone forever, or at least for my lifetime.”

Yep. And the bigger picture:

While other states have barely held on through the recession, North Dakota’s boom has brought a windfall of state tax revenue and jobs; the state’s 3 percent unemployment rate is the lowest in the nation and conservatives tried — without success — to repeal the state property tax because of high oil tax receipts.

But the oil rush has also brought soaring home prices, makeshift camps for workers, overbooked hotels and an explosion of heavy truck traffic and crime. Towns are gritty and cheerless. Stacks of pipe lie along the roads, waiting to be buried. 

I would make some crack about how you can't please everyone, but this is a real dilemma. Rural areas are pretty much by definition unprepared for an influx of people, and they are attached to old rhythms. But those rhythms promise long-term decline. The economic balancing act necessary to keep young people in the countryside, but not launch a destabilizing (and tacky) boom, is beyond us. So the choice for rural communities remains either slow death or rapid transformation.

A Chinese Warrior's Tomb of the Third Century

Chinese archaeologists have excavated the tomb of a noble warrior of the Three Kingdoms period, after the collapse of the Han Dynasty in the 3rd century CE.

The tomb, found in Xiangyang, contained a man about 45 years old and a woman of similar age, surely his wife.

Among the finds was this magnificent bronze horse.

Chinese tombs often contain small, ceramic models of things like houses and chariots, and this tomb had a good selection of such objects. Above, a house.

And a pigpen.

Bronze disk. Many more artifact photos at Livescience.

Fred An, Japanese Maple in Portland, Oregon

From National Geographic's travel photo contest.