Old Church, Suntak, Sweden

The Old Church (gamla kyrka) in Suntak, Sweden was built in the 12th century.

All at about the same time, apparently, despite the appearance of separate sections. The wooden roof has of course been replaced.

The interior once boasted several medieval relics, but the 12th-century font has been moved to the New Church, built in 1902.

And this medieval bench to the local museum.

The interior decoration dates mainly to the eighteenth century, although some of the faded paintings may be as old as 1400. Love those coats of arms on the wall.

Seems like a fascinating place.

What Happened in Waco?

Unless you live nearby or know lots of bikers, you have probably lost track of the crazy story from Waco. Last spring shooting broke out in the parking lot of a steak house, and nine people were killed. Since then: silence. And not because news organizations have lost interest:

Four months after a shootout left 9 bikers dead at the Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, Texas, prompting the arrest of 177 people, many of them presumably innocent, authorities are still denying the public access to key pieces of evidence, including video. The legal fate of arrestees still hangs in the balance. And it still isn’t known how many of the dead bikers were killed by bullets that police officers fired.

But police bullets did hit some of the bikers, the Associated Press reports after reviewing 8,800 pages of evidence apparently leaked to the news organization. “The gunfire included rounds fired by police that hit bikers, though it isn't clear whether those rifle shots caused any of the fatalities,” Emily Schmall reports. “Investigators have offered scant details about what sparked the fight or how the gunfire played out, and no one has been charged.” 18 bikers were wounded but survived the melee.

Lawyers in the case have seen “dashboard video of people fleeing the scene while shots ring out, audio of police threatening to shoot people if they rise from the ground and photos of bodies lying in pools of blood in the restaurant parking lot,” AP adds. But neither police nor defense attorneys are talking about the evidence due to a broad gag order that a coalition of media organizations is challenging as unconstitutional. It was imposed by a judge who is a former law partner of the local district attorney.

This is crazy. The longer this goes on, the worse it looks for the Waco police. What are they hiding? Was it an officer who fired first, touching off the slaughter? Was the whole business about a fight between rival gangs a sham? I don't know, but right now it looks like nobody else knows, either, except perhaps for people in the DA's office who aren't saying for reasons that look increasingly bad.

Noah Millman on Hypocrisy

A few weeks ago we had a discussion here about allegations of hypocrisy and the part they play in American public life. I am still very interested in this question, so I thought I would pass along this very interesting post on the same topic by Noah Millman. Millman is responding to a column by Damon Linker, who wrote:

When we denounce someone for hypocrisy, we judge him harshly, but without having to express a substantive commitment of our own with regard to ends. The hypocrite is judged entirely on his own terms, accused of violating the ideal of human flourishing that he himself professes to uphold, revere, and use as a standard for judging others. The hypocrite is guilty, as we say, of having “double standards” — expecting exacting behavior from others while letting himself off the hook more easily. Simply pointing that out seems to allow us to be judgmental while remaining agnostic about whether we actually affirm any vision of human flourishing ourselves.

But that isn’t quite true. When we call someone a hypocrite, we often do so on the basis of two implicit moral assumptions: first, that a person who expresses a moral standard should be expected to live up to it with complete consistency; and second, that if a person fails to live up to it with complete consistency, the moral standard should be abandoned and replaced with one that can be consistently followed.

Linker goes on to make the same point that I regularly make, that since everyone falls short of his or her ideals at some point, the only way to avoid all hypocrisy is to have no ideals at all. Linker calls this "a license to aim low and succeed."

Millman responds,

I understand his point – and I think that, in general, our culture could benefit from vastly less denunciation, shaming and witch-hunting on the part of would-be puritans of all political stripes. But I think his conclusion is considerably over-broad – and mis-states the rationale behind many denunciations of hypocrisy. . . .

Other times, the charge of hypocrisy is pretty clearly tied to a real disagreement about what the morality of ends should be, as opposed to an objection to ends as such. Let’s say you have a married, male, Christian minister, a firm opponent of gay marriage, who is revealed to be having an affair with another man. Clearly, this fellow is going to be zinged for hypocrisy. But those doing the zinging are not neutral on the matter of “ends” – far from it. It’s likely that, in their view, it is a positive good to be honest, privately and publicly, about one’s sexuality, and that repressing it does actual harm, both to oneself and to others. The minister is denounced not so much for failing to live up to his own morality of ends, but because he is a walking proof-text for an alternative morality of ends.

I think Millman is absolutely right in this; sometimes the accusation of hypocrisy is made to attack the moral system of the alleged hypocrite as false, unnatural, or otherwise too flawed to be worth following.

Now let’s change the example – say that the minister is revealed to be having an affair not with a man, but with a woman. He’ll still be zinged for hypocrisy, but the charge would read somewhat differently – because it is unlikely (though not impossible) that those doing the denouncing believe in an alternative morality of ends in which cheating as such is fine. And yet, the force still comes from a real disagreement within a morality of ends, and not a dispute about the legitimacy of a morality of ends. The force comes from an implicit argument that public profession of Christianity is a lousy means to the end of sexual fidelity – and that attacking gay marriage for being a threat to faithful heterosexual marriages is particularly obnoxious because it burdens an uninvolved minority with the sins of the majority.

Again Millman is right. Christian evangelists often claim that without religious morality, the world is doomed to perdition. So accusations of hypocrisy against straying shepherds can be a way to say, no, there is no such relationship between religious belief and moral behavior. This is why some liberals are always pointing out that divorce is more common in the Bible Belt.

The charge of hypocrisy, in other words, is usually embedded within a larger framework of argument, one which may affirm or reject the specific morality of ends that the accused hypocrite claims to uphold. Rather than deny the legitimacy of the charge of hypocrisy, wouldn’t bringing that context out into the open advance the cause of honest argument more effectively?

I agree. But I still dislike making these arguments in terms of hypocrisy. Gay marriage is not a good thing because some Christian ministers have gay affairs; nor is the existence of perfectly non-hypocritical Catholics any sort of argument against gay rights. I find the accusation of hypocrisy to be an irritating distraction. But I conceded that, as Millman says, there can be a lot of substance behind such accusations.

The Beast in the Tree

Franz Xaver Winterhalter: the Master of Women in Dresses

Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805-1873) was the most stylish and sought-after court painter in an era of when royal women wore truly sumptuous clothes. Thus his many female portraits are as much of dresses and jewels as they are of women, and when you see one of his paintings online the face has often been cropped out, leaving only the dress. Today the Getty had the painting above on their Tumblr, but they did not reproduce the whole thing. (Leonilla, Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, 1843).

Instead they show these details, emphasizing Winterhalter's magnificent treatment of fabric. An interesting fate for a man who once burned to be one of the leading artists of his age.

Winterhalter was born in the Black Forest to a family of well-off peasants, the sixth of eight children, four of whom died in infancy. Strange background for a court painter. He attended a monastic school, where some art-loving monk must have noticed and encouraged his talent. He left school at 13 and entered the first of a series of apprenticeships with artists and printmakers in southern Germany. Until he was 28 he supported himself mainly as a lithographer. (Study of a Girl in Profile.)

Winterhalter had his first close association with royalty in 1828, when he became drawing master to Sophie Margravine of Baden (above, a portrait of 1830).

From then on Winterhalter's reputation spread among European royals, especially after he moved to Paris in 1836. He painted Queen Victoria for the first time in 1842; he eventually did 120 paintings for her, mostly portraits of her and her family. This number gives you some idea of the number of portraits he painted, since Victoria was not even his top client.

Famous image of Victoria in 1843, which used to be the banner at the web site of Britain's National Portrait Gallery.

Winterhalter's most generous patrons were Emperor Napoleon II and Empress Eugénie of France, shown above in a portrait of 1861.

Once he had the patronage of France's rulers, the orders flooded in. Winterhalter was not entirely happy about this. He did not mind painting portraits, which was how most painters of his era paid the bills. But his real ambition was to do the sort of academic scenes (historical, mythological) that got top placement in the salons and earned their creators critical acclaim. What was he to do, though? It was devilish difficult to refuse requests from all these sovereigns and mighty duchesses, some of whom demanded to be painted again and again. (Countess Katarzyna Potocka, 1854)

He said yes and endured the trials of being a wealthy celebrity artist, getting ever richer while his critical reputation steadily sank. "Not serious," said the masters of the art world. "Oh duchess, you look magnificent!" said Winterhalter, as some chamberlain filled his pockets with gold. (Madame Barbe de Rimsky-Korsakov, 1857)

Clothes. Oh, the clothes.

Mourning was no bar to wearing fabulous clothes, as long as they were black. (Princess Kotschoubey, 1860)

For variety, here is a fascinating painting of Queen Victoria and her family: The First of May, 1851. This painting celebrated the first birthday of Prince Arthur, the 82nd birthday of his godfather the Duke of Wellington, and the opening of the Crystal Palace Exhibition (in the background). The arrangement is modeled on paintings of the Three Magi presenting their gifts to Jesus; poor Prince Albert looks about as involved as Joseph usually does.

Princess Elizaveta Esperovna Troubetzkaya, 1859. As with many other Victorians, Winterhalter's reputation sank when the Impressionists took the art world by storm and by 1900 his paintings were disappearing from museum walls. Now they are back.

An unknown lady, painted around 1860.

And finally the work that some consider Winterhalter's masterpiece, Empress Eugénie Surrounded by her Ladies in Waiting, 1855. Nine dresses in one painting! But what dresses they are, and what women.

Redistricting, Race and Class in Brooklyn

P.S. 8 in Brooklyn Heights is badly overcrowded:

To the city, the solution for the overcrowding at P.S. 8 seemed obvious: move those two neighborhoods from P.S. 8’s zone and into that of P.S. 307, which is nearby and has room to spare. The proposal, however, has drawn intense opposition, and not only from the families who would be rezoned from the predominantly white P.S. 8 to the mostly black P.S. 307. Some residents of the housing project served by P.S. 307 also oppose the rezoning, worried about how an influx of wealthy, mostly white families could change their school.

The opposition of P.S. 307 families has a lot to do with the fear of gentrification, which has changed one Brooklyn neighborhood after another. But it underlines the suspicion between the races that is always just under the surface in American -- except when it is boiling over:

For all its diversity, New York City, by some measures, has one of the most segregated school systems in the country, in part because many elementary schools are effectively closed off to children who live outside their zones. And although the Brooklyn rezoning is mainly a response to crowding, it is becoming a real-life study in the challenges of integrating just one of the city’s schools.

If it ain't broke. . .

Sumerian dice from the royal tombs of Ur, 2600 to 2400 BCE

Samnite Tomb in Pompeii

French archaeologists digging in Pompeii stumbled on a rare remnant of the pre-Roman town, a tomb dating to the fourth century BCE. At that time Pompeii was part of the Samnite realm. The tomb held one adult woman, and some nice grave goods. One interesting detail is that the town's Roman inhabitants seem to have known of the site and avoided disturbing it, so perhaps this woman was a minor hero of some kind.

Moynihan's Childhood

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, author of a famous 1965 report on the breakdown of the black family, did not come from a very good family himself:

By his own lights, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ambassador, senator, sociologist, and itinerant American intellectual, was the product of a broken home and a pathological family. He was born in 1927 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but raised mostly in New York City. When Moynihan was 10 years old, his father, John, left the family, plunging it into poverty. Moynihan’s mother, Margaret, remarried, had another child, divorced, moved to Indiana to stay with relatives, then returned to New York, where she worked as a nurse. Moynihan’s childhood—a tangle of poverty, remarriage, relocation, and single motherhood—contrasted starkly with the idyllic American family life he would later extol. “My relations are obviously those of divided allegiance,” Moynihan wrote in a diary he kept during the 1950s. “Apparently I loved the old man very much yet had to take sides … choosing mom in spite of loving pop.” In the same journal, Moynihan, subjecting himself to the sort of analysis to which he would soon subject others, wrote, “Both my mother and father—They let me down badly … I find through the years this enormous emotional attachment to Father substitutes—of whom the least rejection was cause for untold agonies—the only answer is that I have repressed my feelings towards dad.”

I never knew this before, and I find it fascinating. Moynihan could easily have taken the tack that he suffered as much from family pathology as poor blacks, so they ought to do as well as he had. But he did not; he was always full of compassion for African Americans and spent his public career searching for ways to help them.

The most controversial part of the Moynihan report these days is his insistence that many of black America's problems came from the emasculation of black men, and the subsequent dominance of women in black families and communities:

In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.

Which makes it doubly interesting that in his own family he "chose mom in spite of loving pop."

Defectors from the Islamic State

Thousands of young Muslim have left Europe to join the Islamic state. The good news is that many of them have fled back to Europe:

A small but growing number of defectors from the Islamic State are risking reprisals and imprisonment to speak out about their disillusionment with the extremist group, according to a research organization that tracks former and current militants.

The Islamic State considers defectors as apostates, and most of the hundreds thought to have left the group have gone into hiding.

But 58 defectors, nine of them from Western Europe and Australia, have gone public with their testimonies since last year, according to a report to be published Monday by the International Center for the Study for Radicalization at King’s College London.

According to the report, some of the defectors said they disapproved of the Islamic State’s hostility to other Sunni rebel groups that opposed President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and its indiscriminate killings of civilians and hostages. Others grew weary of what they saw as favoritism and mistreatment by commanders, or were disappointed that the life of a militant was far less exciting, or lucrative, than they had imagined. Two left after they found out that they had been selected as suicide bombers.

Really, the western way of life is better for most people. Many of us fear the appeal of fanaticism, revolution, and totalitarian rule, but we shouldn't.

Scott Walker Drops Out

Hooray! Hooray! Hip, hip, hooray!

Goodbye, Scott. Now please fade back into obscurity.

More Debates, More Polls

The latest poll from CNN shows Trump down a little, Carly Fiorina way up, and Scott Walker sinking down into George Pataki territory.

I don't think Trump is finished yet, but maybe the fact that he has nothing to say about most of the issues facing the country will doom him in the end. I can't take Ben Carson seriously. Maybe I am wrong about her, but I also can't Carly Fiorina seriously. The woman is constantly making things up and insisting that they are true, and she failed spectacularly at the only high-profile job she has ever done, running Hewlett-Packard. Barbara Boxer killed her with ads pointing out that Fiorina tripled her own salary while laying off 20,000 workers, and the same attack will work even better in the current climate.

Bush is going nowhere, and none of the lesser men on the list seems poised to breakout. So let's have a summary from Josh Marshall:

And that leaves us with Marco Rubio.

John Ruskin's Drawing School

In 1871, John Ruskin founded a drawing school at Oxford. Over the next few years he assembled 1470 diverse works of art for use his classes. Many were his own drawings, but others were prints, photographs, or works by other artists. They were arranged in series and placed in special cabinets. (Santa Maria della Spina, Verona)

In 1906 these all came into the possession of the Ashmolean Museum. They are now putting the whole collection online. The web site is set up so you can peruse the cabinets in order, or search within the collection for whatever interests you. I love Ruskin's drawings, so I searched for those; more than 200 have already been scanned. Most date to the 1830s or 1840s, when Ruskin was much in Italy. (Cobra, "drawn from life")

There is lots of other stuff in the collection. Ruskin was a fan of Turner, Dürer, and the Renaissance Italian masters, and he included many etchings of their work. But for me, nothing is better than these. Ruskin's drawings of buildings in particular are among my very favorite works of art.(Doge's palace, Venice, detail)

But Ruskin could also draw other things, like this view of pine trees on the Italian coast. Of this he wrote:

The black spruce and the stone-pine are both of equal importance in the Greek mind; as relating either to the mountains, or the sea and ships. But the true pine, whose double leaves give it the epithet διπλόθριξ, grows continually by the sea-shore, and is properly the one sacred to Poseidon. This piece of landscape, showing a bay of the Mediterranean through the stems of the pines, will give you some idea of the mingled grace and strength of the tree, where it grows on crag, and is tried by storms, as among the Greek islands.

Etruscan Cup, detail.

Market in Abbeville, France, and details. Ruskin called this a "sketch."

Study of a Shell.

Glacier des Bossons, Chamonix.

Capitoline Hill from the Forum, Rome, and Detail.

Ivy-Leaved Toadflax.

Tombs of the della Scalas, Verona.

Kingfisher.

Piazza della Erbe, Verona.

Ponte della Pietra, Verona. I spent two hours last night perusing these images, and if I had time I would do it again today.

Median Income Falls; Drug Profiteering Soars

The latest data from the census bureau:

The median American household in 2014 had a lower income, in inflation-adjusted terms, than it did in 2013. The $53,657 the household in the middle of the income distribution earned last year was down 1.5 percent from the year before, though the census said that shift was not statistically significant.

But even if that drop is a statistical blip and you assume that middle-class incomes were really flat, flat isn’t anything to celebrate in the current environment. The 2014 real median income number is 6.5 percent below its 2007, pre-crisis level. It is 7.2 percent below the number in 1999.

Meanwhile, certain investors are doing very well for themselves by buying up old drugs with only one manufacturer and obscenely jacking up the prices:

Specialists in infectious disease are protesting a gigantic overnight increase in the price of a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection.

The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager. Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars. . . .

Although some price increases have been caused by shortages, others have resulted from a business strategy of buying old neglected drugs and turning them into high-priced “specialty drugs.”

Cycloserine, a drug used to treat dangerous multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, was just increased in price to $10,800 for 30 pills from $500 after its acquisition by Rodelis Therapeutics. . . .

In August, two members of Congress investigating generic drug price increases wrote to Valeant Pharmaceuticals after that company acquired two heart drugs, Isuprel and Nitropress, from Marathon Pharmaceuticals and promptly raised their prices by 525 percent and 212 percent respectively. Marathon had acquired the drugs from another company in 2013 and had quintupled their prices. . . .

Doxycycline, an antibiotic, went from $20 a bottle in October 2013 to $1,849 by April 2014.

Why are they doing this? Because they can. They know that it would take many months for another firm to gear up to make a competing product, and that other firms are unlikely to do this for two reasons: because the markets for these drugs are comparatively small, and because if they entered the market with a lower-priced product, the price-gouging firm would just cut their prices. Consumers would benefit, but not investors. So, in our system, it does not happen.

These companies are simply exploiting the weaknesses of our bizarre, half public/half private health care system. Demand for many drugs is not very dependent on price, because neither the patient nor the doctor pays the price, which is born by the insurance company, which is barred by many laws and rules from actively intervening in the choices of the doctor and patient. And unlike just about every other country in the world, the U.S. government does not set prices for drugs, on the theory that this will be done by "the market." It's simply insane. And it is just another example of how our system is set up to reward wealthy investors by screwing everyone else, which explains why they keep getting richer as the rest of the population lags farther behind.

UPDATE

Sometimes public pressure works:

A huge overnight price increase for an important tuberculosis drug has been rescinded after the company that acquired the drug gave it back to its previous owner under pressure, it was announced on Monday.

Score one for the Times, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and the rest of us outrage warriors.