Pygmies and Cranes

This little Roman mosaic appeared on the auction market last month. It depicts a dwarf wrestling a crane, one of my favorite ancient obscurities. The oldest mention of this theme is in the Iliad:

And when each of them was marshaled with their leaders,
the Trojans went with a shriek and a war-cry,
like birds, just as the shriek of cranes arises in the sky,
the ones who, fleeing storm and endless downpour,
fly with a shriek over the streams of Okeanos
bringing slaughter and death to Pygmy men;
high in the air, they provoke dread strife;
but the Achaeans went in silence, infused with might,
eager in their hearts to protect one another.

Which is interesting partly because this passages uses the battle of pygmies and cranes to explain something else, as if the battle of pygmies and cranes were a familiar thing like a storm or the other natural phenomenon that Homer used in his similes.

There are many depictions in ancient art; this is the famous Francois vase, dating to around 560 BCE and signed by the painter Kleitias. Notice that the "pygmies" are small but well-proportioned men, not dwarfs as in the later Roman examples. There are several other depictions of them riding goats.

That great repository of ancient fake news, Pliny's Natural History, says this:

Beyond these in the most outlying mountain region we are told of the Three-Span (Trispithami) Pygmae who do not exceed three spans, that is, twenty-seven inches, in height; the climate is healthy and always spring-like, as it is protected on the north by a range of mountains; this tribe Homer has also recorded as being beset by cranes. It is reported that in springtime their entire band, mounted on the backs of rams and she-goats and armed with arrows, goes in a body down to the sea and eats the cranes' eggs and chickens, and that this outing occupies three months; and that otherwise they could not protect themselves against the flocks of cranes would grow up; and that their houses are made of mud and feathers and egg-shells. Aristotle says that the Pygmies live in caves, but in the rest of this statement about them he agrees with the other authorities

The battle of pygmies and cranes is a very weird notion, and I have never come across any sort of explanation for it. But it must be very ancient, since it is known in China and North America as well as Europe. This scholarly article, dense with Greek and words that look English but make no more sense to me than the Greek does, connects Homer's simile to a dance done in early Athens in which the dancers imitated cranes. I am unconvinced, but if it were true that would be kind of cool, because crane dances have been done by people around the world from Lapland to Australia.

I suppose it doesn't really have to mean anything; maybe it's just a strange story that catches people's imagination, as it has caught mine, and thus got remembered. But it seems to have endured for 13,000 years, since before people crossed to the new world, so I wonder.

Russell Kirk's Ten Principles of Conservatism

I just stumbled across a reference to Russell Kirk's list of "conservative principles," written in 1993, and given my fondness for manifestos I decided to look them up. Each is explained more fully in this essay, based on the book chapter in which they originally appeared.

First, the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. "That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent."

Second, the conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity. "It is old custom that enables people to live together peaceably; the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire."

Third, conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription. "Conservatives . . . believe in rights of which the chief sanction is their antiquity—including rights to property, often."

Fourth, conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. "Providence moves slowly, but the devil always hurries."

Fifth, conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. "They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems."

Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability. "Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created."

Seventh, conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked. "Separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all."

Eighth, conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism.

Ninth, the conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions. "Knowing human nature for a mixture of good and evil, the conservative does not put his trust in mere benevolence. Constitutional restrictions, political checks and balances, adequate enforcement of the laws, the old intricate web of restraints upon will and appetite—these the conservative approves as instruments of freedom and order. A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty."

Tenth, the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society. "The conservative is not opposed to social improvement, although he doubts whether there is any such force as a mystical Progress, with a Roman P, at work in the world."

*        *        *

This is an interesting list. I have always been struck by the importance conservatives attach to the first, the existence of a permanent moral order. I have read dozens of times that if there is no such permanent, probably divine order, no morality is possible and anarchy is inevitable. But even if you grant that point in theory (which I don't), I am more impressed by the problem of figuring out what that moral order is. Based on what conservatives have said over the past few centuries, the divine order used to permit slavery but then it stopped; it used to permit wife beating but then it stopped; it used to permit wars of conquest and empires but then it stopped. How useful is such a mutable concept?

So that leaves us with the second and third points, keeping old ways of doing things because we know they work. I agree with this, to some extent; for example I think that the expansion of the welfare state since World War II has led to a huge decline in severe poverty, so we should obviously keep doing it.

This gets me to my main beef with contemporary American conservatism: that it sometimes has nothing to do with what has worked in the past. There is nothing old, tested or prudent about hi-tech global capitalism, or in particular about the way Wall Street does business in the 21st century. So why do conservatives resist almost any attempt to rein in unchecked capitalism? I don't get it.

And what was prudent about George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, his authorization of torture, or his doctrine of preventive warfare? All of these were supported by most American conservatives, even though they violate just about all of the Kirk's principles. Which leads me to think that Kirk has omitted something important from his list.

My candidate for that missing something would be suspicion of other people, especially people from outside one's own social group. Psychological studies consistently show that liberals trust strangers more than conservatives do, and I think much of Kirk's intellectual rhetoric is a cover for this. You could see Bush's whole post-9-11 foreign policy as a desperate attempt to wrest control of our nation's fate from outsiders who threatened it, and to reach a state in which our power was so great that we did not have to trust anyone.

The conservative devotion to private property is related to this lack of trust; if you can't rely on others, you have to build up your own resources so you can take care of things yourself. If you share all you have with the group they'll probably just waste it anyway.

The principle of variety is a complete red herring. All parties support it when their power is limited but forget about it when they have the chance to impose their own vision on everyone. Viz., the politics of gay marriage in the US, which changed so quickly that we all got to watch liberals crying for states' rights while the conservatives tried to impose their vision on everyone via the Defense of Marriage Act, and then a few years later the Supreme Court struck that down and imposed the liberal vision on the whole country while Republicans pleaded for localism. I cannot remember a single case when the party with a clear national majority was interested in letting the states try the other party's approach.

I find the seventh principle particularly interesting; I agree that freedom and property are "closely linked." But whereas Kirk was thinking mainly about the threat of communism, I think private property unchecked by government is an equally dangerous threat to freedom; a whole lot of damage has been done in the world by corporations with too much money for local communities to exert any control over them. I think experience shows that societies that don't allow quite a lot of it either crumble or turn Stalinist, so I support private property. But I think it should be kept within prudent limits.

I agree most profoundly with Kirk when he emphasizes balance and tension. Yes, freedom and authority are always in tension, and governing well means finding the right balance. That some sort of victory by one's own political side would solve all the world's problems is a persistent belief, but it is a fantasy. Extremism never works. Only compromise works; only balance works. The goals of political movements should never be totalistic; neither the Revolution nor the Reaction will end our troubles. The goal should always be to maintain the balance, while pulling it a little in the direction you prefer.

Today's Headline

Russian Malware Communicates by Leaving Comments in Britney Spears's Instagram Account

The story:

A key weakness in malicious software is the "Command and Control" (C&C) system: a central server that the malware-infected systems contact to receive updates and instructions, and to send stolen data. Anti-malware researchers like to reverse engineer malicious code, discover the C&C server's address, and then shut it down or blacklist it from corporate routers.

Turla is an "advanced persistent threat" hacking group based in Russia with a long history of attacking states in ways that advance Russian state interests -- suggesting that they are either a part of the Russian espionage system, or contracting to it.

A new analysis by Eset shows that Turla is solving its C&C problems by using Britney Spears' Instagram account as a cut-out for its C&C servers. Turla moves the C&C server around, then hides the current address of the server in encrypted comments left on Britney Spears's image posts. The compromised systems check in with Spears's Instagram whenever they need to know where the C&C server is currently residing.

Noah Millman on the British Vote

Exactly:

My initial take on the British elections is that it is further proof that nobody knows what to do about the forces that are motivating the political ructions of the contemporary West. . . .

It strikes me as wildly implausible that the British people were, as of a few weeks ago, solidly behind Red Toryism, and are now suddenly enamored of 1980s-vintage Socialism. These wild swings are evidence, rather, of how shallowly held any such beliefs are, and how restless the public is for someone who can speak to their anxieties in a language of confidence. . . .

That lack of confidence is pervasive, and it’s due to the fact that nobody, left, right or center, really has an answer for the deep forces ripping apart the fabric of Western societies. The rise of hundreds of millions of Asians into the middle class, the huge increase in migration from South to North, the severing of cultural and economic ties between city and countryside — these trends are stronger than individual states, and simply declaring yourself against them or their effects is not the same as having a response. . . .

And so: a million mutinies now — and likely another election far too soon.

Baby Bird in Amber, 105 to 95 Miliion Years Old

Amazing discovery.

Feather details.

Foot.

Night Traveling

Fine grass, slight wind,
Tall mast, night boat;
Stars hang, vast plain,
Moon bobs in trout’s mouth.

Great name, small man,
Body bent, resigned.
Drift I, black hull,
Earth, sky, lone gull.

— Tu Fu (712–770)

translated by Richard O’Connell

Eduard von Grützner, Mephisto

1895

Electoral Floundering in Britain

It looks like Britain's conservative party lost its majority in the election PM Theresa May called to expand her majority and strengthen her hand in Brexit talks with the EU. The Tories will still be the largest party and will probably form the government, but instead of helping May this result hands a big win to Jeremy Corbin and his left-leaning Labour Party.

I think putting this result side-by-side with the Brexit vote sums up pretty well where electorates in at least Britain and the US are these days: not strongly favoring any particular party or faction, just dissatisfied with the status quo and looking for some kind of answer.

UPDATE

Here's a slightly different way to see this election:

Something beats nothing. And in the end, May was nothing.

People – many people, that is, not a majority but enough to turn elections – are looking for a vision. They are not impressed by managerial competence or fidelity to old ideas. They want to hear that somebody is going to change things in a way that helps them. By defiantly promising only more of the same, May messed up big-time.

Be Something

Just sat through another middle school graduation, which went about as you would expect.

The principal gave a speech about the "BE - ATTITUDES." Like, Be positive. Be considerate. Be creative. Seven things like that, the rest of which I can't recall because they all blur together for me. And then the inevitable eighth:

be yourself.

And if it so happens that you are not positive, creative, considerate, or whatever the other four things were, too bad.

Sigh.

300,000?

Fascinating news from Morocco, where archaeologists have found fossils of our own species that may be 300,000 years old. As you can see from this reconstructed skull, the people of Jebel Irhoud did not look quite like modern humans, and their brains had a different shape. Which is exactly what we would like to find; people couldn't have changed species in a single generation.

(In fact I think Hominids were changing so rapidly and generating such diversity over the past million years that species designations are arbitrary and not very helpful. But the convention of assigning every fossil to a named species did not originate with these anthropologists, so it would be cantankerous to let this issue get in the way of celebrating a great discovery.) Here is a jaw bone from the Jebel Irhoud site, which looks very like a modern human's.

Stone tools from Jebel Irhoud. These had been burned, and the 300,000 date comes from thermoluminescence dating of tools. Which is not the most reliable or accurate method, but for that date range it's about as good as anything else.

With every passing year the story of human origins gets richer and more interesting.

Opioid Lawsuits

The Attorney General of Ohio, Mike DeWine, has filed a huge lawsuit against five drug companies for their part in creating our opioid painkiller crisis. The suit accuses them of false advertising, both exaggerating the benefits of the drugs and minimizing the harm they cause:

The lawsuit cites several examples of misleading marketing: An Endo-sponsored website, PainKnowledge.com, in 2009 claimed that “people who take opioids as prescribed usually do not become addicted.” Janssen approved and distributed a patient education guide in 2009 that attempted to counter the “myth” that opioids are addictive, claiming that “many studies show that opioids are rarely addictive when used properly for the management of chronic pain.” Purdue sponsored a publication from the American Pain Foundation, which is heavily funded by opioid companies, claiming that the risk of addiction is less than 1 percent among children prescribed opioids — suggesting pain is undertreated and opioids are necessary.

This is only a small sampling. In total, DeWine claims opioid companies spent “millions of dollars on promotional activities and materials that falsely deny or trivialize the risks of opioids while overstating the benefits of using them for chronic pain.”

Meanwhile the Cherokee Nation has filed their own lawsuit against the distributors of these drugs, claiming that they have not fulfilled their obligation under Federal law to investigate doctors or clinics that issue unusually large numbers of prescriptions. I have read before about some doctors who got away for years with handing out pills like crazy, and the distributors absolutely have a legal obligation to do something about it. The Vox story cites a good example:

The small town of Kermit, West Virginia, has a population of 392, but a single pharmacy there received 9 million hydrocodone pills over two years from out-of-state drug companies.

In their defense the companies will cite the big movement that took off in the 1990s to treat pain more aggressively and argue that they were just responding to what doctors and patients wanted. We'll see; it seems to me that both of these legal avenues have a good chance of succeeding, and it would not surprise me at all if we end up in a few years with a gigantic tobacco company-style nationwide settlement.

Meanwhile many people who first got addicted to prescription pills have already moved on to heroin, which is cheaper, so even completely cutting off the supply will not solve the problem. But imposing more discipline on the prescription process seems like a good step.

Names

I am fascinated by the name of the NSA contractor accused of leaking a report on the Russian hacking investigation: Reality Winner. I checked, and "Reality" does not show up on lists of the top 1000 baby names from the 1990s, so this was not a trend that I missed.

So what are you saying when you name your baby "Reality"? Like, wow, I'm having a baby, reality is really crashing in on me now? Or, now I'm having a baby and I have to get real? Or, OK kid, you'll have to cope with reality sooner or later just like I have, so we might as well get that process started right away?

Or was it the combination of the two that appealed, as in, my baby's going to be a winner at reality? This is what a relative told reporters, that her father "always wanted a real winner." (And her mother gave into this?') According to same source he intended to call her by her middle name, Leigh, but her first babysitter called her Reality and it stuck.

Still waiting to hear about somebody who had two kids and named them Reality and Fantasy.

Shooting Stars

Or that's what I've always called these wildflowers, which grow as weeds in my garden. They seem to be some species of Solanum, that is, nightshade, maybe Solanum dulcamara, which goes by a wide variety of names that include bittersweet, bittersweet nightshade, blue bindweed, Amara Dulcis, poisonberry, trailing bittersweet, and trailing nightshade. The fruit is a little poisonous.

Spurious Correlations

Amusing web site with thousands of these. And some of these utterly unrelated things correlate at fantastic rates like .998, which is way better than almost any scientific result you have seen in the news.

Raising Tough Kids

I just stumbled across a reference to Senator Ben Sasse's book on childrearing and citizenship, and I was intrigued enough to look it up. From the Times' review:

He might hail from an ancestral line that includes a Lutheran church officer on one side and a manufacturing executive on the other, but he spent his childhood learning the value of “real work,” weeding soybean fields as a 7-year-old and waking before dawn to detassel corn. Any privilege in his upbringing was a temptation to be resisted rather than a boon to be enjoyed. The same now goes for his three children. Last year the Sasses sent their 14-year-old daughter to work on a cattle ranch so that she could experience the “unrelenting encounter with daily necessity,” like learning how to drive a manual tractor and, he proudly recounts, donning shoulder-length gloves to perform rectal exams on pregnant cows.

“At our house we have come to conclude that building and strengthening character will require extreme measures and the intentional pursuit of gritty work experiences,” Sasse writes, and he presents his book as a guide for parents determined not to raise the kind of soft, entitled kids he encountered when he was president of Midland University. He says that the idea for The Vanishing American Adult first came to him several years ago, when a group of Midland students were asked to decorate a 20-foot Christmas tree on campus, and they dressed only “the bottom seven or eight feet … the branches the kids could easily reach.” Sasse was “startled” — “shattered,” even. Seeing this Christmas tree “worried me for the kids.” So began his growing awareness of “a collective coming-of-age crisis without parallel in our history.” He noticed that the affliction he observed at Midland could be found in the households of his closest friends and even his own home. His daughters once complained of being unable to sleep because the air-conditioning was broken. Sasse was aghast. “When I was a kid, we had air conditioning in the house … but we never used it.” The fact that his daughters claimed a “need” for air-conditioning left him and his wife with “a heavy sense of failure.”

It's easy enough to mock this sort of thing from an upper middle class white guy, but I certainly don't think it's ridiculous. It is, after all, an old idea that a coddled upbringing is bad for children, and parents have been doing the equivalent of sending rich kids to work on ranches for at least two thousand years. Some kids would probably respond well to it.

On the other hand, if the problem was to build a digital Christmas tree rather than decorate a real one, today's Midland students would probably do a lot better than those of Sasse's generation. Which would be a lot more relevant in our economy. It is simply a fact that the number of "gritty" jobs goes down every year; if you tried to send all Americans kids to get some experience of ranch life there wouldn't be nearly enough work for them all to even get a taste.

So I am ambivalent about this, as I am about most advice on parenting. I am simply not impressed at this point in my life that anything parents do makes as much difference as Ben Sasse seems to think.

Summing Up Identity Politics

Long essay from Ezra Klein summing up what most of us have already figured out: that voting is almost entirely about identity. He starts from a recent political science blockbuster, Democracy for Realists by Larry Bartels and Christopher Achen. Bartels and Achen take on what they call the “folk theory” of democracy:

Ordinary people have preferences about what their government should do. They choose leaders who will do those things, or they enact their preferences directly in referendums. In either case, what the majority wants becomes government policy.

But this clearly is not so. First, elections are swayed by national and international events much more than by arguments. This is what you might call the old political science, that people “support the Ins when things are going well, and support the Outs when they seem to be going badly.” Writing in 1925, Walter Lippmann called this “ the essence of popular government.” There is obviously something to this, since economic fundamentals predict election outcomes better than anything else. But focusing on the outcome obscures the deeper fact that even a president who wins a landslide wins only 55% of the vote. Despite the unpopular war in Iraq and the Wall Street collapse, John McCain got 46%. Events can turn elections because of that 10% in the middle who for the most part pay no attention to politics except during the month before a presidential election; the other 90% gives their own party unwavering support. And this is getting worse:

There is one overwhelming fact that structures American politics, and it is this: People who vote for Republicans vote for Republicans, and people who vote for Democrats vote for Democrats. It might sound tautological, but it isn’t. A few decades ago, people who voted for Republicans often voted for Democrats, and vice versa. Split-ticket voting was common, and even hardcore, self-described partisans were often persuadable.

Not anymore. There are a few findings that rocked my understanding of politics, and one of them came from political scientist Corwin Smidt. Looking at decades of election data, he found that self-described independent voters today are more loyal to a single party than voters who described themselves as “strong partisans” were in the 1970s. This bears repeating: The people who say they’re free from either party today are more partisan in their voting habits than the people who said they were strong loyalists of a single party in the ’70s.

And at the emotional level:

In 1964, 31 percent of Republicans had cold, negative feelings toward the Democratic Party, and 32 percent of Democrats had cold, negative feelings toward the Republican Party. By 2012, that had risen to 77 percent of Republicans and 78 percent of Democrats. Today, fully 45 percent of Republicans, and 41 percent of Democrats, believe the other party’s policies “threaten the nation’s well-being.”

I don't know what to do about this, but strikes me as very dangerous to the long-term future of the Republic. The one thing that I can imagine making a difference is to shift the conversation away from identity matters – race, religion, gender, sexual orientation – and toward more neutral ground like economic policy, making government work better, improving our infrastructure, and making our cities more livable. But Americans don't seem to care much about that boring stuff these days, when we could be shouting about the identity issues that are really close to our hearts.

Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Trump

Strange things happening on the Arabian peninsula.

Earlier this week Saudi Arabia, along with the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen – that is, the Yemeni government recognized by the US and Saudi Arabia – all severed diplomatic ties with Qatar. Except for Egypt, they also cut off direct air travel and ordered their citizens in Qatar to come home. (Tens of thousands of Egyptians work in Qatar.) This puts the US military in a real bind because our air base in Qatar is the key piece in our Persian Gulf defense infrastructure, which also includes major bases in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

I spent some time last night trying to find out what this was all about and discovered disappointingly little. Pundits who can be counted on to mouth off about any foreign policy incident, interpreting it as proof that their views of the world are correct, have had nothing to say. (Yo, Tom Friedman!) Most of the links I have found have been to foreign policy journals and web sites with paywalls, as if nobody but diplomats or oil speculators would have any interest. But this strikes me as an important development, and I would really like to know more.

The pretext offered by the Saudi government was that Qatar is aiding their enemies in Yemen, the Houthis. Nobody in the west seems to take this very seriously. Instead westerners point to tensions that have been simmering for some time that especially relate to events in Syria and tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran:

Qatar, one of the richest countries in the world, has used that wealth in recent years to play an outsize role in regional politics. It has often sought to cast itself as a broker, trying to mediate the region’s intractable conflicts. But just as often, it has ended up angering all sides.

Its actions are a study in contradictions. Qatar has good relations with Iran, but hosts the American air base. It is helping to fight the Iranian-linked Houthi rebels in Yemen, and it is backing insurgents fighting Tehran’s ally, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Yet it has also established back channels to Iran and brokered deals with it.

Tensions had been building for years. There was Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood, which challenged the established order in Egypt before being suppressed by the current government. Qatar also has supported Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip and is a rival of the Palestinian Authority. And the broadcasts of the Pan-Arab news network Al Jazeera, which Qatar funds, have long ruffled feathers across the Middle East.

There was a weird incident last year in which an Iran-backed militia in Iraq took hostage a large party of wealthy Qatari falcon hunters, including members of the royal family, and held them for ransom. They were finally released in April after 16 months of murky negotiations involving Qatar, Iran, Iraq, and various factions in Syria. The Qatari royal family paid millions to secure the release of the hostages, only to be accused by some prominent Saudis of orchestrating the whole thing as a way to subsidize Iran-backed factions in Iraq and Syria.

And then this:

The Saudis next escalated the dispute with Qatar considerably. The Saudi media reported May 28 on an open letter from the Al-Shaykh family, the descendants of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The letter is signed by all 200 of the male descendants of the founder of Wahhabism in the kingdom. The al-Shaykhs are the al-Saud's critical partners in the ruling of the kingdom and provide its religious legitimacy. The minister of Islamic Affairs and the grand mufti both signed the letter.

The letter accuses the emir of an unidentified Gulf emirate of falsely claiming that he is a descendant of Wahhab. This false claim is not only "fabricated" but it also is allegedly being used to misinterpret Islam. The letter demands that the bad emir change the name of the largest mosque in his country, currently named the Shaykh Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab Mosque.

That would be Qatar, of course.

The immediate trigger for the diplomatic break seems to have been the summit Trump and the Saudi King staged last month, which was supposed to present a unified front against Iran. Instead it drove into the open the dispute between the Qataris and the Saudis. Some also say that Trump's firm support for the Saudis emboldened them to take a harder line. It certainly irritated the Emir of Qatar, who publicly chided the Saudis for putting too much faith in a president obviously distracted by domestic troubles. (Incidentally this was also the line taken in Pakistan, where a spokesman criticized Trump's "bluster" and a government-allied newspaper called the summit "theater of the absurd." The Pakistanis have been wicked in Afghanistan but they seem genuinely committed to avoiding war with Iran.)

As you can tell, the thing that captivates me about this dispute is the weird mix of hyper-modernity and medieval swagger. On the one hand these are modern nations whose capitals are hi-tech mega-cities full of globe-trotting businessmen; that's Doha, Qatar above. On the other hand this really sounds like war talk to me. I don't see a straight out Saudi assault on Qatar, which is protected by American missile batteries, but I wonder if there is a real danger of escalation. What if there is a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia or Egypt and some high Qatari official is accused of abetting it? What if documents (forged or otherwise) are captured in Syria that seem to show Qatari support for the Islamic State or al Qaeda? What if there is another uprising of Shiites in Bahrain or eastern Arabia and the Qataris lend them vocal support and covert aid? We've already seen Lebanon and then Syria descend into civil war; could the same thing happen in the rich Gulf states? And what would the US military do if fighting erupting right outside the gates of our bases?

And might this end up fueling Saudi-Iran tensions and maybe lead to a regional war?

I don't have any particular scenarios in mind and I don't really expect a war. But I also wouldn't dismiss the possibility, and it doesn't help my confidence to imagine Trump and his people trying to keep the peace.

UPDATE

Now President Trump is personally taking credit for the isolation of Qatar via twitter:

During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar — look!

So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding...

Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism!

Good luck with that, Mr. President.

UPDATE 2

Good article a week ago in the Post provides background.

Health and Other Things

From Sarah Kliff's article on pain treatment at Vox, this little tidbit about the dead-end town of Williamson, West Virginia:

Nationally, 10.1 percent of Americans rate their health as “fair” or “poor.” In Mingo County, where Williamson is, that figure stands at 38.9 percent.

Now I ask you, what is that about? People in Mingo County are a little older than average, but not enough to explain such a big discrepancy.

The only explanation I can think of is cultural. It has to be some combination of pessimistic self-reporting and health actually being depressed by poverty and lack of faith in the future.

I can imagine that more people in places like Mingo County tell pollsters that their health is poor because that's just how people talk. If you live in Silicon Valley your neighbors are all talking about their workout routines and their new juicers and their cool jobs, so it seems downright shameful to admit to poor health. But in Mingo County your neighbors are all talking about their health problems and how bad things look in general, so there is no shame in telling strangers about your lumbago. Or anyway I can see something like this being a factor.

But there are other ways of measuring health than by surveys, and they all show that in America poor people are a lot sicker than rich people. Some of the causality runs the other way, that is, people are poor because they are sick; good mental health is the main thing you need to be economically successful, and good physical health helps a lot. But that doesn't tell the whole story. However you look at the data it seems that being poor and especially having no hope that you will ever stop being poor grinds people down and ruins their health. It's a sad, sad story and one of the most important reasons to fight poverty no matter what it costs.

Two Excellent Books about Ancient Civilizations

I have finally found a recent book on the ancient Indus or Harappan civilization (c 2600 to 1900 BCE) that I can recommend, Indus by British scholar-journalist Andrew Robinson (2016). It's a good length (187 normal-sized pages), easy to read, well illustrated, and packed with information from end to end. Robinson's chapter on the efforts to decipher the Indus script is the best thing I have read on the subject, covering several recent claims of decipherment and reviewing the state of actual knowledge. It covers all the recent developments: the expanding number of Indus sites, the debate over the impact of climate change on the Indus decline, and attempts by Hindu nationalists to hijack Indus studies for their own political agenda. First rate.

I especially liked Robinson's chapter on what Indus archaeology tells us about the origin of Hinduism, a politically charged topic these days. A brief summary would be that there is no clear connection between the ancient Indus and intellectual Hinduism either in its modern or Vedic forms, but there may have been a lot of continuity at the level of simple village cults. For example there is an Indus plate (above) depicting crocodiles connected to the central symbol with dark bars. In the 1970s anthropologists documented a cult in several villages of Gujarat in which people made offerings of meat, milk and alcohol to images of crocodiles mounted on wooden poles. It's an eerie parallel. There are also other visual analogs, such as gods standing in fig trees and women marking their foreheads with vermilion paste to indicate marriage.

Meanwhile I have also discovered another marvelous book in the same vein, Ancient Assyria: a Very Short Introduction by Karen Radner (2015). This little book is the size of a paperback thriller has just 112 small pages but it contains all sorts of information about Assyria that I did not know. Which is not really surprising, because scholars know a lot about Assyria these days. Besides all the royal inscriptions, which add up to thousands of lines, we have hundreds of state letters and accounts describing routine matters of governance. (That's the beauty of writing on clay.) We also have hundreds of letters from Assyrian traders and ambassadors residing abroad, and a massive archive from the Assyrian trading colony at Kanesh in Turkey. More tablets are still being discovered, and new material is translated every year. Add in accounts from Egypt, Phoenicia, Persia, and so on, as well as the Bible, and it amounts to a record better than we have for most medieval states before the 13th century, or even the Roman empire in the 3rd and 4th centuries.

Consider for example the reign of Esarhaddon (above), which lasted from 681 to 669 BCE. Esarhaddon was a younger son and his older brother was for a long time the designated crown prince. In 683 the king, Sennacherib, disinherited the crown prince and made Esarhaddon his heir. The crown prince and his friends immediately began to scheme against Esarhaddon, who went into exile. The crown prince's men then assassinated the king, after which Esarhaddon launched an armed invasion and bested his brother for the crown. This is documented in many places, including the Bible's Book of Kings, Esarhaddon's official inscriptions, and dozens of state letters that were written as events unfolded. For example we learn from one letter than one of the brother's men tried to betray the plot to the king, but the plotters tricked him by leading him blindfolded before what they said was the king – apparently this was standard practice for low-level functionaries, who were not allowed to set eyes on the king in his private apartments – whereupon he revealed all he knew about the plot to the plotters themselves, who of course killed him immediately. Esarhaddon managed to seize the throne and do away with his brother, but he never rested easy. His letters document dozens of inquiries to every important temple and oracle demanding divine information on plots and rebellions. Teams of royal astrologers scanned the heavens for signs of danger. Esarhaddon set up a repeating, monthly inquiry to the temple of the sun god Shamash demanding to know whether any of his officials or servants ("any of the eunuchs or the bearded officials, the courtiers, the members of the royal line, senior or junior, or any other relative of the king or the military officers" and so on for a whole page of text) were conspiring against him.

Esarhaddon was also regularly sick, and he suffered great grief after the death of his first wife and eldest son. The Rite of the Substitute King was used for him repeatedly. Under this ancient, arcane ritual a condemned man was brought in to fill the role of the king for 100 days, eating his meals and sleeping in his bed, while the king went into hiding; the substitute, having taken the king's ill luck onto himself, was then executed. But not even this helped Esarhaddon escape from the shadows, and he went to his grave wrapped in physical pain and paranoid fear.

Radner's book is full of such material, immediate and real despite the vast gulf of time and cultural distance. Highly recommended.

Zhang Daqian

Last year the artist whose paintings earned the most in worldwide auctions was Chinese modernist Zhang Daqian (1899-1983). According to Artprice, his works

generated $354.8 million in auction sales last year — $31 million more than Picasso, who weighed in at No. 2.

Zhang's success is part of a major trend. Several other Chinese artists were also in the top ranks of global sellers, and overall Chinese auction houses led the world with 38% of global auction revenues. One New York dealer comments,

In 1985 it was illegal to sell art in mainland China, and now there are 400 auction houses. The rules are being set by Chinese buyers.

It should be noted that statistics for Chinese art sales are not any more reliable than statistics for other parts of the Chinese economy, so take them with the usual grain of salt. There are stories about auction prices inflated by corrupt deals between buyers and sellers, with the buyer actually paying only a fraction of the hammer price. Forgery is also a huge problem. But also as with other parts of the Chinese economy, it's obvious that something big is happening in the Chinese art world.

So who was Zhang Daqian? He was born into a struggling but artistic family in Sichuan province; his brother was a moderately successful painter of tigers. (Just tigers. Many, many tigers.) He later said that his first commission came at age 12, when a travelling fortune teller paid him to paint him a new set of divining cards.

He studied for a while in Japan in 1917, and in 1919 he moved to Shanghai to study painting with two of China's leading guohua or traditional artists, Zeng Xi and Li Ruiqing. In Shanghai he was able to study masterpieces from China's past, and part of his training was to copy their works. He was particularly taken by painters of the 17th century, the "Ming-Qing individualists," especially Shitao. These men pursued their own quirky aesthetic as the Ming empire first plunged into civil chaos and was then conquered by the Manchus. One wonders if his studies of that era provided him with a model of how to be an artist in a time of political turmoil.

Zhang got so good at imitating the techniques of old Chinese masters that he created several forgeries that fooled the best experts of the time. This is one, a painting formerly attributed to the 10th-century Song Dynasty master Guan Tong, acquired as an original by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Claims have been made that other accepted ancient Chinese works from around the world are also Zhang forgeries, but the one in the Met mentioned by wikipedia has been confirmed as a Song original. So far as I can tell, these forgeries are the only Zhang works from the 1920s that survive, or at least that are represented online.

In the 1930s Zhang moved to Beijing, where he entered into a partnership with Beijing native Pu Xinyu; they created collaborative works under the name “South Zhang and North Pu.” Again, I can't find any pictures from this period, so I don't know what they looked like. As the war with Japan raged around him, Zhang threw himself into classical studies, producing many more copies of old works and amassing a collection of classical paintings. In 1940 Zhang led an expedition to the caves of Mogao and Yuli to make copies of their Buddhist wall paintings. This seems to me a perfect symbol of withdrawal from the political world; presumably the Nationalist leadership supported him because they considered it vital that the ancient Chinese tradition not be broken despite the spiraling destruction of world war, and the withdrawn Zhang seemed the perfect man for this mission. (One of Zhang's paintings from the early 1950s, Recluse in the Summer Mountains, which as you can see was made as a traditional folding screen.)

In 1949 Zhang fled the communist takeover of China, but he did not accompany the Nationalist government to Taiwan. Instead he went to South America, living in Brazil and Argentina through the 1950s. Over the next decade he devoted a lot of effort to marketing himself to western audiences as a great Chinese painter. For example in 1956 he met Pablo Picasso in an event covered by the worldwide press as the Meeting of East and West. Zhang was hugely productive throughout his life, creating as many as 500 paintings a year, a mix of huge landscapes and small studies like this one. (Bird on a Cherry Branch, 1959)

Also in the 1950s Zhang developed the style for which he is now famous, the Color-Splashed Landscape. This is Early Snow, 1965. at the top of the post is the one from which the name comes, Landscape with Splashed Colors, 1969.

Opinions differ at to how this came about. Most western experts think Zhang was influenced by Abstract Expressionism. Zhang himself cited a traditional Chinese precedent, the "splashed ink technique" of 9th-century painter Wang Mo. Others point out that Zhang's eyesight was deteriorating, making it hard for him to carry out the sort of finely detailed ink painting in which he had specialized. But whatever the reason, the style was and remains a huge success. I love it. (Wind in Pines amidst Morning Mist, 1969)

Zhang remained an experimentalist and painted in other styles as well; this is Crimson Lotuses, 1975.

In 1978 Zhang moved to Taiwan, allowing the Nationalist government to provide him with a fine house and a chauffeur for his last years. His house in Taipei is maintained as a monument to his life. (Mount Lu, 1979)

And here to close is my personal favorite, Ancient Temples amidst Clouds, 1979.

Symbolic Politics with the Paris Accords

Forgive me for not seeming very upset that the US has pulled out of the Paris climate accord, but then I never took it seriously. It was a voluntary agreement with no teeth, doubly so in the US where Obama never even submitted it to the Senate for a ratification vote. (It would have gotten hammered.) It was simply a symbol of a worldwide elite consensus that human-caused climate change is a real danger.

So it was perfectly predictable that Donald Trump, a master of symbolism, would reject the treaty, metaphorically aligning himself with coal miners, oil drillers, factory workers, and guys who drive big trucks. If there is a consensus among the Davos set, the UN bureaucracy and the European Union Council, of course Trump wants to spit on it.

The difference to the climate future of the earth will be minimal, and so will the effect on the US economy and US "leadership."

Trump's fans will cheer him for it and his enemies will condemn him for it.

While I'm on that subject, yesterday I happened to see a two-week-old news story on job growth in April, which the headline called "STELLAR." The first two comments were, "Thank you President Trump" and "Thank you Obama for leaving." But the preliminary estimate for job growth in April was 211,000,  a little above the average for the past two years of Obama's term but far below his best months. And, just now the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised that number down to 174,000, just below the recent average, and the preliminary May number is a mediocre 138,000. The lesson is 1) that the president's impact on the economy is small, and 2) many Americans will insist that it is huge. They will also believe that things are better when their guy is in the White House and worse when the president is from the other party, regardless of whether the president has even had time to take any actions of economic significance.

Trump's followers will credit him for any piece of economic good news and insist that it is better than Obama ever did even if that isn't so. Trump's opponents will blame him for any piece of bad news and say things were never that bad under Obama, even if that isn't so.

To get back to climate, you can expect that Trump's fans will attribute any good economic news over the next few years to his actions, including his rejection of the Paris treaty. Trump's enemies will attribute any bad economic news to the same causes, along with any bad environmental news.

Meanwhile the things that will actually determine the planet's climate future will continue to be the progress of solar cell and battery technology, fracking, offshore wind power, and a commitment by hundreds of millions of people around the world to reduce their carbon footprints.

Not that politics doesn't matter; governments can do a lot. But with a Republican Congress, there isn't much that Hillary or Bernie could have done to help, and even when he had a Democratic Congress Obama didn't manage to do very much. The biggest political issue right now is the rules governing how private solar panels will connect to the power grid, which is being fought out entirely at the state level.

Forget Trump. Forget Paris. Focus on putting in place technology that works.

Lookism

Unattractive People Are Seen As Better Scientists

The First Responsibility of Liberalism

To preserve the meaning of words is the first responsibility of liberalism.

–Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Ancient Pula

Pula is a coastal city in Croatia that was more important in Roman times than ever before or since. It boasts a remarkable collection of antiquities, about which I just learned.

First on the list is the Arch of the Sergii. Pula – Pola to Italians – was conquered by the Romans in 177 BCE and was promoted to colony by Julius Caesar in 46 BCE. In 42 BCE they took the wrong side in the civil war that followed Caesar's assassination and Mark Antony had the city demolished. But it was soon back in business, renamed Colonia Pietas Iulia Pola Pollentia Herculanea after Octavian's daughter Julia.

In the next Civil War, between Octavian and Antony, they chose the right side, and men from the town fought for Octavian at the climactic battle of Actium. To celebrate the victory, one of the town's leading families put up this arch. I imaging the Sergii reclining in the dining hall of their villa, wine cups in hand, saying, "Why, we've just had a splendid year! Let's put up a triumphal arch to ourselves!"

The Arena was built sometime between 27 BCE and 68 CE.

There are also the Twin Gates, built in the 2nd century CE.

And a Roman theater.

Most remarkably, the Roman forum is still the town square, and the small temple of Augustus still stands beside it.

There are also Christian buildings from the early Middle Ages – parts of the Basilica were built in the 6th century– and this fine Communal Hall, begun in the 11th century and completed in the 16th.

So there is a lot to see in Pula. And it won't be too crowded, because it is a working port with a bit of an industrial atmosphere, not as fun for vacationers as other Croatian towns. Which makes it splendid for visiting old buildings in the company of a few friends, or alone.

Student Protesters and the Folly of Diversity Training

At Evergreen State College in Washington last week there was a weird incident in which a bunch of radical students took over the president's office and he ended up thanking them for it:

Let me reiterate my gratitude for the passion and courage you have shown me and others.

But, well, whatever. Maybe he is an old radical and having his office taken over by protesters was the most exciting thing ever to happen to him in his current job. Who am I to judge?

What I want to write about is one of the demands made by the students:

We demand mandatory sensitivity and cultural competency training for faculty, staff, administrators, and student employees.

Meanwhile, at the University of Wisconsin:, radical students were really angry that the local chapter of Young Americans for Freedom invited Ben Shapiro to speak on campus:

We, the undersigned are asking that UW-Madison administration take a hard look at the charter of Young Americans for Freedom … and ideally put the involved students through intensive diversity training and have the charter revoked so Y.A.F. is no longer a campus organization that can create a hostile environment on campus.

Demands for diversity training have figured in many of the student manifestos of the past few years. This makes me slightly crazy, because one thing we know about race and gender relations is that diversity training does not work. Here's a summary of the biggest ever study:

A study of 829 companies over 31 years showed that diversity training had “no positive effects in the average workplace.” Millions of dollars a year were spent on the training resulting in, well, nothing. Attitudes — and the diversity of the organizations — remained the same.

It gets worse. The researchers — Frank Dobbin of Harvard, Alexandra Kalev of Berkeley, and Erin Kelly of the University of Minnesota — concluded that “In firms where training is mandatory or emphasizes the threat of lawsuits, training actually has negative effects on management diversity.”

Read enough about this and you'll find lots of claims about what sort of training is good or bad, but they all disagree with each other and none of them have real data to back up claims of improvement. Diversity training has become big business, so of course it has generated a lot of pseudo-facts and methodological fads. Don't believe them. Nobody has been changed by these courses in any fundamental way, and quite a few have been intensely pissed off by the experience.

So far as I can tell, diversity training has no positive effect, and according to some studies it has a negative effect. It is at best a pointless and at worst a terrible thing for the protesters to demand.

So why do protesters keep demanding it?

They are making an error that I have written about before: they believe that if people only knew what they knew, those people would think what they think. They believe that if you only understood what they have experienced, you would agree with their politics.

They believe that if they could only sit the racists and the sexists and the haters down and shout the truth at them for long enough, they would change their minds.

This belief is part of our culture; everybody says, "Just hear me out." "You're not listening." But no; people really can listen to your side of the story and learn all the facts that you present and still disagree with you.

What's more, we live in a democracy, so creating change ultimately comes down to changing the mind of the median voter. And one thing we know about voters is that hectoring criticism is a very bad way to change their minds. Radical protesters who go around insulting people, shouting down speakers, and so on are not helping their own cause. They are making things worse with every word, and they really ought to stop.