Craved Bread from Hanna P.

A North Carolina baker who posts a lot on Instagram. More here.

Post-Apocalypse and the 1964 Alaska Earthquake

How do people actually behave during a disaster? It varies, of course, but I am fed up with the notion, so widespread in our culture, that people turn into roving bands of vicious criminals. So I bring you Jon Mooallem on the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964:

The Great Alaska Earthquake had a magnitude of 9.2, and it whipped the city of Anchorage around for a full four and a half minutes. Buildings keeled off their foundations, slumped in on themselves or split in half. For two entire blocks, every storefront along one side of the city’s main thoroughfare simply dropped, plummeting into a long, ragged chasm that had ripped open underneath it; one theater marquee came to rest level with the street. Downtown looked “like the devil ground his heel into it,” one witness said.

We actually know quit a lot about how people reacted, because the Defense Department had recently created the Disaster Research Center to study exactly that question.

The Cold War was escalating. In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, America’s Office of Civil Defense was desperate to prepare Americans for the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. One of the agency’s animating insights was that a bomb dropped on the United States wouldn’t just cause physical destruction, but pandemonium, desperation and barbarism among survivors. “The experts foretold a mass outbreak of hysterical neurosis among the civilian population,” the social scientist Richard M. Titmuss wrote in 1950. “They would behave like frightened and unsatisfied children.” . . .

But when the disaster researchers started touching down in Anchorage, a mere 28 hours after the earthquake, they almost immediately began discovering the opposite: The community was meeting the situation with a staggering amount of collaboration and compassion.

Right after the shaking stopped, ordinary citizens began crawling through the ruins downtown, searching for survivors, and using ropes to heave people out of the debris field under Turnagain. When Presbyterian Hospital started filling with gas after the quake, Boy Scouts who’d been distributing phone books in the neighborhood helped walk the hospital’s 22 patients down three or four flights of stairs, and an armada of taxis and other civilian drivers pulled up outside to evacuate everyone to a second hospital, across town. Outside the crumbling J.C. Penney, bystanders rushed to dig people out, and worked together to tow away a huge section of the fallen concrete facade with their vehicles, then extract a woman who’d been crushed beneath it in her station wagon. “Everybody jumped right in,” one man who’d been on the scene told the sociologists. “Everybody was trying to do a little bit of everything for everybody.”

By daybreak the following morning, hundreds of volunteers had spontaneously converged on the city’s combined police and fire station, similarly eager to pitch in. No one in the city government had anticipated this onrush or put any system in place to manage it. The conventional wisdom was that in a disaster, authorities had to worry about hordes of civilians chaotically fleeing the hardest-hit area. Here, everyone was piling in to help.

The police chief deputized dozens of citizens to prevent looting, but it turned out there wasn't much looting to prevent.

As I said, responses to disaster vary, but the response of the people of Anchorage is far from rare. Our obsession with social breakdown is the weird thing.

Spring

Peter Robb, "Midnight in Sicily"

Peter Robb's Midnight in Sicily, published in 1996, is half about the experience of living in southern Italy and half about the mafia corruption trials that brought an end to the First Italian Republic. I found it a weird book because I thought the two parts did not go together well. I did, however, very much like certain scenes from each half. There is some great material about the restaurants and hotels of Palermo, the rituals of Italian coffee, and especially the impact of heroin on street culture of Naples. There is also some great material on the mafia and the pervasiveness of corruption in Italy.

The basic story of modern Italy is this: After World War II, Italy was the only country in the West that had a really strong Communist party, which regularly got 20% or even 30% of the vote and was sometimes the biggest party in Parliament. (Partly because the Communists were the only ones who actually fought against the Fascists.) In the late 1940s the US brought all the anti-communist Italians together and told them, your job is to make sure the communists never get power. So from then down to 1994 all Italian governments were coalitions, usually including both the main right-wing party (the Christian Democrats or DC) and the main center-left party (the Socialists). Some of the work that went into organizing all those coalitions was done in a secret Masonic Lodge called P-2, an old institution relaunched by Italian gangsters at the behest of the CIA that included half the Italian leadership among its members.

(If you search for P-2 online you will find all sorts of crazy stuff about secret meetings of men with red robes and masked faces and an inner clique called the "Wolf Pack" who were all sworn to kill to protect the Lodge and so on, and you may end up thinking that this has to be made up. Maybe half of it is, but the P-2 Lodge was real, counting five Italian Prime Ministers and 200 generals of the armed forces and police among its members. And by the time you're done reading about what really happened in Italian politics, you may start believing in the red robes and the Wolf Pack, too.)

The DC had some strength across Italy but it was based in the south, and its continued presence in every Italian government depended on always winning the vote in Sicily. The DC always won in Sicily because they had a deal with the mafia; the mafia delivered the Sicilian vote, and the DC ignored the mafia, in fact denied the existence of the mafia even though every single person in Sicily knew this was a lie.

The depth and breadth of corruption that sprang from this deal would be impossible to believe if it weren't so copiously documented. Giulio Andreotti, three times Prime Minister, was accused by prosecutors of being a Made Man in la Cosa Nostra, and several mafia witnesses testified that he ordered the assassinations of communist labor leaders. Everything was sold or traded for favors: permissions to build new buildings or tear down historic ones, fishing licenses, construction contracts, jobs in museums and tourist bureaus, everything over which the state had any control. Especially egregious was the way money voted for earthquake relief was spent on hotels owned by mafiosi or roads to their estates or just flat-out stolen while homeless people lived for years in WW II surplus quonset huts.

What finally brought this perfect system down was a war within the Sicilian mafia. In the late 1970s a faction from Corleone, led by the monstrous Toto Riina, launched a violent takeover of the whole organization, murdering hundreds of rivals. Seeing that there was no more honor among the mafiosi, several leading members turned state's witness. Their testimony was made public in the 1986 "Maxitrial," which led to the jailing of hundreds of mafiosi. In the course of this investigation the magistrates turned up evidence that many, many government officials colluded with the mafia, including the leadership of the DC. It was a two steps forward, one step back operation, with many mafia convictions overturned on appeal by DC judges, apparently at the behest of DC politicians. But some Italians struggled on, determined to learn the truth.

In 1992 the two magistrates most involved in fighting the mafia, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, were assassinated on the orders of Riina. This caused a profound reaction even among the cynical people of Sicily, and a wave of anti-mafia feeling led to first Riina and then his two successors being betrayed to the police. Riina was convicted in 1995 and died in prison. A committed group of investigators and judges followed the trail all the way to the top, and in 1994 they indicted Prime Minister Andreotti himself.

Andreotti was convicted twice but both convictions were overturned on appeal, and he died a free man in 2013. But the Christian Democrat party evaporated, paving the way for the TV tycoon Silvio Berlusconi (former member of the P-2 Lodge) to become Prime Minister. Some outsiders marveled that Italians voted for the clown Berlusconi or some of the weirder parties who came into Parliament in the 2000s, but consider that the entire Italian establishment had been shown to be corrupt and allied with the mafia; you would probably have voted for crazy people over them, too.

It's dizzying, really. While reading about this stuff I always think, this doesn't happen in America. Or does it? Am I naive? After all millions of Americans believe that the Clintons have ordered many assassinations. I don't believe that, but I have to wonder what about the world is hidden from me. Is the Sinaloa Cartel really in a war with the Mexican government? Where did the Covid-19 virus really come from?

Who is lying to us, and how would we know?

Billie Eilish Tries to Shock an Unshockable World

It amuses me that Billie Eilish tried to be dark musician who shocks people but found the world impossible to shock. In this Times piece, Eilish tells about how she once dreamed she committed suicide and wrote a song about it called "I had a dream I got everything I wanted":

Recounting this episode, Billie sat cross-legged on the living-room couch at Finneas’s house, mashing her mismatched Air Jordan 1s into the cushions. Her hair was dyed ink-black with a seepage of acid green at the scalp, and she wore an all-black outfit: an oversize bowling shirt printed with an image of two women, wearing crowns, covered in blood and kissing, and cargo pants that, in their stylized profusion of straps and pockets, struck a compromise between goth and SWAT. As she spoke, I could see her left eyebrow twitching — Billie has been given a diagnosis of Tourette’s syndrome, which manifests mainly in facial tics and muscle tensing. . . .

As today’s pop superstars go, Eilish is remarkable for her abiding interest in the grim and the upsetting. She has resuscitated an aesthetic of macabre transgression that has been almost entirely absent from the musical mainstream since the ’90s heyday of rock acts like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. In her lyrics, narrators murder their friends and liken lovers to hostages. In her music, bright singalong hooks are subsumed by bursts of distortion, and whisper-quiet verses are interrupted by shrieking samples of a dentist drill. In her videos, which she helps to devise and occasionally directs herself, she has cried black tears and released a large spider from her mouth. In one, faceless tormentors burn her with cigarette butts; in another, they jab her with syringes.

And for this we gave her half the Grammys and made her very, very rich.

It's really hard to be too dark for America these days.

Which reminds me that for a long time I've been thinking about a post pointing out that by far the most popular site for artists to post their work online is called DeviantArt.

Links 13 March 2020

Theodore Roosevelt Monument, Washington, DC

Short review of a book on how childhood shapes your later life.

Crazy Times story about feuding billionaire neighbors in the Bahamas, with allegations of sexual abuse, witness tampering, and more.

Love among scientists: "You have the most beautiful data set," he said. . . . she went to the library and checked his citations.

There is, apparently, a whole genre of essays complaining about the marketing ploys of "late capitalism" without drawing the obvious inference that maybe you should stop relying on buying things to make you happy.

Chinese birthrate plummeting: 17 million births in 2017, 11 million in 2019.

Kidnapping in Haiti: "No one is immune."

Traveling the Silk Road through Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

The actual story of Typhoid Mary.

Photographs of Notre Dame under restoration.

At the Times, historian Richard White has an interesting take on where Bernie Sanders fits in the tradition of American socialism (the 19th century, not the 20th).

Turkish troops smash a Syrian army offensive and scare off their Russian backers using cheap, home-made drones. NATO official: "Dropping these bomblets on Syrian regime tanks all night got Putin's attention."

The Unmitigated Pedant takes on what he calls the "Fremen Mirage" – the belief that the barbarians of desert or steppe are morally superior to, and tougher in battle than, decadent civilized farmers – in a long multi-part post.

The Situation in Beijing

Normally a busy neighborhood in Beijing

Dan Wang:

A lot of what makes life fun in Beijing has been shut down. My gym is closed, and my personal trainer is still stuck in Heilongjiang, unable to return to the capital after six weeks away. The badminton courts are shut, and the performances at the Egg are canceled. Most of my favorite restaurants are still closed, and those that are open can only serve a fraction of their usual dishes. Whenever my mind drifts to these minor inconveniences, however, I immediately remind myself that I’m living in a state of privilege. An enormous share of the country is going through worse: those living in Wuhan, the migrant workers who are unable get back to work, to say nothing of the victims of the virus.

The silver lining is that Beijing has become pleasantly livable. The shutdown of a great deal of industry has brought many blue skies. The warming weather is a reminder that Beijing is a splendidly beautiful city in the spring and fall. The parks are excellent for birdwatching, and one can have very nice hikes along the Great Wall. I spent the last few weekends bicycling around the city. I’ve always been mortified to admit that I’ve never properly learned how to ride a bike. With the encouragement and in the company of kind and patient friends, I’ve cycled to the Olympic village and the Temple of Heaven. Beijing’s flat roads and wide lanes are great for cyclists.

Authentic Self and Cultural Self

Consider this:

Everyone wants to be authentic. You want to be true to yourself, not a slavish follower of social expectations. You want to “live your best life,” pursuing your particular desires, rather than falling in line with whatever everyone else thinks happiness requires. Studies have even shown that feelings of authenticity can go hand in hand with numerous psychological and social benefits: higher self-esteem, greater well-being, better romantic relationships and enhanced work performance.

But authenticity is a slippery thing. Although most people would define authenticity as acting in accordance with your idiosyncratic set of values and qualities, research has shown that people feel most authentic when they conform to a particular set of socially approved qualities, such as being extroverted, emotionally stable, conscientious, intellectual and agreeable.

I am not especially impressed by this research, which you can read about at the link if you like, but I am fascinated by the question of the authentic self. There is a notion, strong in the western tradition, that you have an authentic self separate from your community and your culture. There are the things that your society says you should want, and then there are the things that you really want.

I very much question whether this is real.

Consider a person who gives up an ordinary, somewhat boring middle class suburban existence married to the right sort of person, doing respectable work, to become a fishing guide in Alaska. He or she might say, "Now I'm being true to my authentic self." But really "running off to be a fishing guide in Alaska" is every bit as much of a cultural construct as "living comfortably as a middle class suburbanite." Conforming is a social role, but in our world, so is trying to break away and live "authentically."

I would say that "authenticity" itself is a cultural construct.

There is no such thing as a person without a culture. Everything we are and do is shaped by the world around us. Including rebelling against the constraints of our culture, which our particular culture very much encourages.

I think often of myself in light of this question, because there is a part of me that wants to be a writer; this somehow feels more authentic to me than sitting at my desk manipulating spreadsheets. But this dream is shared by many thousands and maybe millions of my contemporaries; how much of what I imagine is really me, and how much comes from a shared fantasy of a creative life? (Does that question mean anything?) Novels, the things I most want to write, are a highly contrived and artificial art form only a few centuries old, and fantasy novels are younger still. The stories I want to tell are built from pieces of other stories, telling about things I have been taught are important: love, friendship, struggle, triumph, defeat, acceptance, defiance.

I don't mean to argue that people have no differences. My children were born different from each other in ways that still shape them. But whatever they brought into the world takes form only in and through our particular world; whatever feelings spring from their hearts can only act on the options our culture presents to them.

We make choices, yes. Our world offers us many ways to live, and we have to pick one. But who knows which would be more authentic? I think some people do make bad choices and end up with lives that make them unhappy, and sometimes they do this from caution or submission to their families rather than "following their dreams." But maybe for some people caution and submission are authentic; maybe for some people breaking free and striking out on their own would be utterly false. And consider the feelings that picture arouses in us; despite my desire in writing this to be objective, the cautious, conventional path strikes some part of me as cowardly and weak. But that, I submit, is because my culture taught me to feel that way, and maybe real radicalism would be in recognizing that every choice is a mix of self and society, of will and submission.

What is us and what comes from outside us is an impossible questions to answer, because everything is both.

What is the Scandinavian Model?

Tom Friedman takes Bernie Sanders to task for something I have written about: he claims to admire the Scandinavian countries but doesn't understand how they really work:

Senator Sanders, do you believe the free enterprise system is the best means for growing jobs, the economy and opportunity — or do you believe in more socialist central planning? I ask because I have often heard you praise Scandinavian countries, like Denmark, as exemplars of democratic socialism. Have you ever been to Denmark? It’s democratic but not socialist.

Denmark is actually a hypercompetitive, wide-open, market economy devoted to free trade and expanding globalization, since trade — exports and imports — makes up roughly half of Denmark’s G.D.P.

Indeed, Denmark’s 5.8 million people have produced some of the most globally competitive multinationals in the world, by the names of A.P. Moller-Maersk, Danske Bank, Novo Nordisk, Carlsberg Group, Vestas, Coloplast, the Lego Group and Novozymes. These are the very giant multinationals Sanders constantly rails against.

As the former Danish prime minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen once remarked in a speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to those who might not fully grasp the Danish model: “I would like to make one thing clear, Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy. The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state, which provides a high level of security for its citizens, but it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish.”

Actually Bernie Sanders is very smart and he may understand this perfectly well. He seems to believe, though, that the existing American system can never be made to produce those goods because of the conservative forces that oppose them. He thinks we have to smash those forces, and the way to do so is by mobilizing voters, especially young votes, with talk of revolution.

But "revolution," as I said here before and Friedman also emphasizes, is antithetical to the Nordic way:

The less obvious, but more important, feature of Denmark’s success is the high-trust social compact among its business community, labor unions, social entrepreneurs and government.

The Nordic model involves getting everybody together in a room to talk things out rationally, and mainstream politicians there shun the sort of rhetoric that would make those agreements difficult. America is of course very different politically, and maybe Sanders thinks that since the American right refuses to be rational and polite, he'll be damned if he will. About that, maybe he is right. But if you ask me the underlying reason that Americans won't agree to the sort of high-tax, high safety, lots of free services model they have in Denmark is that we hate each other too much. Whatever else Sanders is doing, he is not helping overcome that problem.

Edward Curtis on Prince Edward Island, 1914

Native American masks and costumes photographed on one trip in 1914, now in the Library of Congress. This is the mask of a Qagyuhl culture hero known as the Octopus Hunter, who kills a giant octopus in a famous tale.

This one is captioned, "Woman wearing a fringed Chilkat blanket, a hamatsa neckring and mask representing deceased relative who had been a shaman."

Qagyuhl dancers

Alice Oswald, "Memorial"

A partial translation of The Iliad published in 2013 that focuses on death and simile. Selections:

Like a wind-murmur
Begins a rumour of waves
One long note getting louder
The water breathes a deep sigh
Like a land-ripple
When the west wind runs through a field
Wishing and searching
Nothing to be found
The corn-stalks shake their green heads

     *     *     *

Like an oak tree struck by lightning
Throws up its arms and burns
Terrifying for a man out walking
To smell that sulphur smell
And see the fields flickering ahead of him
Lit up blue by the strangeness of god

     *     *     *

As if it was June
A poppy being hammered by rain
Sinks its head down
It’s exactly like that
When a man’s neck gives in
And the bronze calyx of his helmet
Sinks his head down

Poor ARCHEPTOLEMUS
Someone was there
And the next moment no one

     *     *     *

Like the hawk of the hills the perfect killer
Easily outflies the chattering dove
She slips away but he follows he ripples
He hangs his black hooks over her
And snares her with a thin cry
In praise of her softness

Role Models

The latest:

Although women earn approximately 50 percent of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) bachelor’s degrees, more than 70 percent of scientists and engineers are men. We explore a potential determinant of this STEM gender gap using newly collected data on the career trajectories of United States Air Force Academy students. Specifically, we examine the effects of being assigned female math and science professors on occupation choice and postgraduate education. We find that, among high-ability female students, being assigned a female professor leads to substantial increases in the probability of working in a STEM occupation and the probability of receiving a STEM master’s degree.

This is the killer argument for affirmative action. You may wish that the gender and race of teachers would make no difference, but lots of studies have found effects like this; for some people it really matters to see "someone like me" in a leading role.

Children of the Spanish Flu

Fascinating piece by Alex Tabarrok, following up on some work by Douglas Almond, about the impact on the 1918-1919 flu pandemic on the future lives of people who were in utero when the flu struck:

Fetal health is found to affect nearly every socioeconomic outcome recorded in the 1960, 1970, and 1980 Censuses. Men and women show large and discontinuous reductions in educational attainment if they had been in utero during the pandemic. The children of infected mothers were up to 15 percent less likely to graduate from high school. Wages of men were 5–9 percent lower because of infection. Socioeconomic status…was substantially reduced, and the likelihood of being poor rose as much as 15 percent compared with other cohorts. Public entitlement spending was also increased.

This makes me think of all the folklore surrounding pregnant women and what they shouldn't see or experience, you know, that it will damage the baby if the mother experiences a severe fright. Maybe they derive from experience with disease, remembering that most people have had no clear way of separating infection from other kinds of harm.

I also wonder about the impact on whole populations where conditions like severe intestinal parasites were endemic.

If only some candidate would do it my way!

What surprised pundits most about Biden's Super Tuesday surge was that he won 60 percent of new voters. Ezra Klein explains:

Lurking beneath the theory that high turnout would disadvantage Joe Biden is what we might call the “disappointed nonvoter thesis.” Scratch a political devotee and you’ll almost always find the same theory of turnout underpinning their plans: If only a candidate would say what I already think but louder. This reflects the disappointment that the very engaged have with their leaders: Practicing politicians have to appeal to mixed constituencies to win reelection or pass anything in Congress, and so they compromise their beliefs, sand down their edges, trim their ambitions.

The politically engaged perennially argue that the way to mobilize the nonvoters is to offer a clearer choice, rather than a muddled echo. Under this theory, Bernie Sanders is the clear turnout candidate, as his sharper and more ambitious agenda can mobilize nonvoters who don’t think either party speaks for them. Conversely, Biden is the business-as-usual choice.

In general, this strategy disappoints. The most famous “choice, not an echo” candidate, Barry Goldwater, lost in a landslide. And he’s the rule, not the exception. Political scientists have long found that more ideologically extreme candidates face an electoral penalty.

I got really sick of this in 2009-2010 when all the left-wing pundits were arguing that if Obama just jettisoned the moderates and came out "boldly" for a bigger stimulus and a more radical health care plan the power to do these things would somehow have materialized. But magic doesn't work, and it still takes 51 senators to pass a bill.

And nonvoters, study after study shows, are less radical than political obsessives, not more so.

One of the most important lessons of politics is that other people do not secretly agree with you.

Nathan Wirth, Among Giants

Photographs of redwoods in the Lady Bird Johnson Grove shot using an infrared camera. More at Moss and Fog.

Today's Headline

'Ancient Sword of the Meth King' seized by Michigan police

Edward Burtynsky, Colorado River Delta

Amazing photographs documenting how humans have transformed the region. Once the Colorado Delta was a vast and productive ecosystem made up of marshes, mudflats, and lagoons teeming with life. Then came the dams, and the irrigation projects, and now only a trickle of fresh water reaches the sea, supporting a comparative trickle of life. Colorado River Delta No. 1, 2011.

Burtynsky:

While trying to accommodate the growing needs of an expanding, and very thirsty civilization, we are reshaping the Earth in colossal ways. In this new and powerful role over the planet, we are also capable of engineering our own demise. We have to learn to think more long-term about the consequences of what we are doing, while we are doing it. My hope is that these pictures will stimulate a process of thinking about something essential to our survival; something we often take for granted—until it’s gone.

 Colorado River Delta #8

I wanted to understand water: what it is, and what it leaves behind when we're gone. I wanted to understand our use and misuse of it. I wanted to trace the evidence of global thirst and threatened sources. Water is part of a pattern I've watched unfold throughout my career. I document landscapes that, whether you think of them as beautiful or monstrous, or as some strange combination of the two, are clearly not vistas of an inexhaustible, sustainable world.

Colorado River Delta #2

Colorado River Delta #10, abandoned shrimp farms. More Burtynsky here, and at his web site.

Claire Hastings: Scottish Folk

Scottish "Musical Storyteller" Claire Hastings, the BBC "Young Traditional Musician of the Year" in 2015, had a great album last year, Those Who Roam. I discovered it from Ted Gioia's list of the year's 100 best recordings. Some songs on YouTube:

Come Spend A While Wi' Me
Fair Weather Beggar
The Bothy Lads

Sample lyrics, not entirely clear for Americans, but you can get the gist:

For they’re awfy lads the bothy lads
Gin they get what they’re seekin
They’ll pack a kist an they’ll gang an enlist
An’ leave the lassies greetin

When a wis noo but sweet sixteen
Wi’ beauty just in bloomin
Little little did I ken
At nineteen I’d be greetin

For the plooboy lads are gey braw lads
But they’re fause an deceiving
For they’ll tak a’ an they’ll gang awa
An leave the lassie’s greetin

The Much-Studied Delinquents of Dunedin

Since 1972, the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study has followed about a thousand New Zealanders, producing enough data to fill more than 1200 published papers. For thirty years two of the study leaders have been American psychologists Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, who have a new book that has put them on all the science news sites.

From an article at Science about their work:

Caspi's first collaboration with Moffitt involved a question that had long intrigued him: Do dramatic life events change people, or simply cement who they already are? The team focused on female puberty. Just over half of the Dunedin study subjects were girls, who by age 15 had been given physical and psychological exams since childhood. Previous studies showed that reaching puberty early is especially stressful, and Caspi and Moffitt found that the girls who had the most trouble adjusting to early adolescence were those who had shown behavioral problems in early childhood. That contributed to Caspi's "accentuation" hypothesis—that stressful transitions tend to accentuate who we basically already are.

Since then, their work has often explored the darker side of human nature. Contrary to what the idyllic landscapes in the Lord of the Rings films might suggest, New Zealand is not heaven on Earth. Economic inequality is comparable to that of the United States, and addiction, suicide, and assault rates are similar. By promising strict confidentiality, the research team gets shockingly frank confessions from their subjects, including about brutality and criminal behavior. (A startling example: Women admitted to physically abusing their spouses as often as men, although they generally inflicted less physical damage.) "We have a policy of never interfering and never ratting them out," Moffitt says. "And the New Zealand police, who understand the value of our research, have never asked."

This long, intimate surveillance enabled Moffitt to track a troubled subset of the Dunedin cohort. Delinquent behavior is known to peak between the late teens and mid-20s, mostly in men. By 15, about a third of the study's boys took part in some degree of delinquency, Moffitt found, while a subset offended more frequently. When she looked at data from early childhood, she found that the habitual offenders had been making trouble from age 3, and had arrest records starting before their teen years.

Over the years, Moffitt reported in a series of papers that these boys did poorly in neuropsychological tests (such as verbal skills and verbal memory), measured high for impulsivity, and were likely to engage in substance abuse as they grew older. In 2002, she reported that at age 26 this same group was committing most of the crimes in the community—a pattern that persisted well into their 30s. In short, whereas many boys exhibited "adolescent-limited" criminal behavior, about 5% were "life-course-persistent" offenders. The work had important implications for social work and law, and won Moffitt the 2007 Stockholm Prize in Criminology.

That makes it sound like criminality is genetic, but then there's this:

It's commonly known that children who are abused often become violent adults. In the Dunedin group, for example, about half the boys with abusive childhoods grew into men prone to committing crimes.

Fascinating.

Gary Lee Price, Young George Washington

On the George Washington Uinversity campus. Apparently this has been in the quad since 2014 but I just noticed it today.

Suffragists in Medieval Garb

Mary Dockray-Miller reminds us that the Suffragists had a thing for medieval dress:

The most famous example of the medievalist impulse in the suffrage movement is Inez Milholland (above), who dressed as a medieval herald as she led the Women’s Suffrage pageant through Washington D.C. on March 3, 1913. With her crown, sweeping white cape, flowing hair, white horse, and riding gloves shaped like armored gauntlets, Milholland provided a medievalist representation of the glamour of the suffrage movement. Her reputation as the most beautiful of the American suffragists only enhanced that glamour. She rode confidently astride her herald’s horse, not in the more demure side-saddle posture. . . .

In her role as the herald of the suffrage parade, Milholland played with conventional medievalist tropes; she saw herself as a crusader or champion for the cause, invoking medieval military language. . . .

Joan of Arc represented a pure, beautiful, young woman fighting for goodness and virtue against men who sought to oppress her. In many of these pageants, a marcher specifically designated as Joan of Arc embodied that military idea. The symbolism focused on Joan as a triumphant female figure of inspiration, purity, and righteousness, ignoring her eventual torture and execution for her religious and political beliefs. For the suffrage paraders, Joan represented a pure, beautiful, young woman fighting for goodness and virtue against men who sought to oppress her. In short, they ascribed their own motives to her.

Links 6 March 2020

Hope for Peace Monument, Beirut, Lebanon.

Update on the genetic study of cancer from Respectful Insolence. Some very important science here.

Mysterious Breton inscription may have been translated.

Scott Alexander looks into John Gottman's marriage counseling empire, is not impressed.

Avocados, drug cartels, Mexico: it's complicated, and a boycott probably won't help.

Times piece on using pack rat nests to study ancient ecosystems; interesting but not enough data to satisfy me.

Can either AI or trained humans reliably spot emotions in faces?

The latest language fad: everyone's a "curator"

Ted Gioia's 100 best albums of 2019. (Gioia is a professional critic who hates anything he finds formulaic, so this includes some strange stuff, but I know several people hungry for new music so I pass it along.)

How often do birds hybridize?

This week's mind-stretching exercise: Richard Rorty, The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy. (pdf download)

Tonight's Fortune

Forgiveness won't change the past, but it can enlarge the future.

Sony 2020 World Photography Awards

“Sunset” by Atanas Chulev. This was taken from a World War I bunker, I think in the Italian Dolomites.

“KOLO” by Jelena Jankovic, showing a Serbian dancer in traditional costume.

“Horse Motion” by Abbas Alkhamis. More, with huge images, at My Modern Met.

And one more by Adam Stevenson, from the contest web site.

Bernie Sanders and the Establishment

There's this thing about Bernie Sanders and his supporters that I find very strange. They set themselves up as rebels against the establishment, which they call a cabal or worse and promise to "destroy," and then get indignant when the establishment fights back. They are, for example, constantly complaining that the media ignores Bernie and finds ways to downplay his successes. One of my sons told me about the color-coding switch above. That and the post below come from r/bernieblindness," documenting the intentional media blackout of Bernie Sanders and his campaign." A typical post:

During the time biden was far ahead in the delegate count before california, when googling primary results, you got a bar graph of the delegates. as soon as cali came in, they changed to a list without a graphic. Posted byu/sarcasticallyabusive

There are lot of amusing miscues on the site, but the people who count mentions on the tv news and column-inches in newspapers say it isn't true, and Sanders' media coverage has roughly matched his poll numbers. It certainly seems to me that Sanders got a lot of coverage between Iowa and Super Tuesday when he was in the lead. And even if Bernie's complaints were true, why would you think the "corporate media" would cover you fairly after you spent all day savaging them?

Today we have been treated to a lot of this:

If Biden wins the nomination, it will be a real lesson in how power works. Bernie was on track to win, Biden had no campaign, and they all knew it. So a few phone calls were made behind the scenes to Amy, Pete, Beto. Several million was put into a pro-Warren Super PAC. Voila!

Um, no, it isn't that easy. But, you know, there are reasons why so many Democratic Party leaders have endorsed Biden: first, they like him. Second, Biden has been playing the party insider game for forty years: attending other candidates' fund raisers, sharing his donor lists, endorsing their campaigns, helping them get riders added to bills, etc. So when he called on them for favors, they said yes. Is this puzzling? As Ezra Klein pointed out, persuading people like Amy Klobuchar and Mike Bloomberg to support you is exactly what a Democratic president has to do to get anything done, and Sanders has so far been completely unable to do it:

Sanders’s supporters have been furious, for weeks, that Warren hasn’t dropped out and endorsed Sanders. What they haven’t done is ask why Sanders hasn’t been able to convince her — or any of the major Democrats who have already dropped out — to endorse him. Whatever case Biden is making or deals he’s offering, Sanders isn’t matching him. Or perhaps the well has been poisoned by Sanders supporters filling Twitter with tweets calling Warren a snake and the Democratic establishment a cabal.

Ok, so you want a revolution. For that, you need an outsider candidate like Sanders. I understand that. But if you're going to attempt a revolution, shouldn't you assume that the people in power are going to oppose you? Did you think the establishment was going to meekly roll over and let you win?

If you want a revolution, you should stop complaining that the establishment treats you unfairly and beat them. If you can't, if you're stuck fighting to make the world better one election and one spending bill at a time, don't despair. Change comes with maddening slowness, but if we fight for it it will come.

The Mafia Modernizes

When the US sent billions in aid to post-WW II Europe under the Marshall Plan and other programs they also sent along a cadre of gung-ho capitalists to help spend it. These men spread the gospel of what was called "productivism" or "Fordism," the belief that by raising productivity capitalist countries could make workers richer while simultaneously raising profits for investors. It isn't a zero-sum game, they kept saying; by working together we can all benefit. (Which in the 1950s and 1960s was true.)

They had a lot of influence, but not necessarily in the places they hoped:

The shift from the old assumptions about limited resources to the new thinking based on expanding opportunities occurred in even the most unexpected corners of the European economy. One was Sicily, where the Mafia dominated much business. Sicily was poor, and Mafia economic thinking centered on scarcity. The organization's aim was to squeeze the greatest possible benefits out of its victims rather than to increase total wealth, and one mechanism for doing this was water. Control of wells and springs allowed powerful Sicilians to extort money from peasants who needed to irrigate arid land, so the Mafia opposed projects might might have increased the total water supply in any area. After the war, though, a new generation of American mafiosi arrived. These men did not come under the aegis of the European Reconstruction Agency, but were sent by the Justice Department, which selected particularly dynamic entrepreneurs from Chicago or New York for deportation back to their country of origin. Like the smooth Harvard graduates who gathered in Rome, the American mafiosi tried to explain the virtues of growth to the Italians. They did not oppose irrigation projects. On the contrary, they favored the construction of large dams. In this way everyone could benefit from a new opportunity — though the Mafia, which took big rake-offs from construction contracts, benefited more than most.

– Richard Vinen, A History in Fragments, p. 292

If Ex-Felons Got the Ballot, How Would They Vote?

Enfranchising felons who have served their sentences is a highly partisan issue in America, because people assume that they would vote Democratic. The head of Alabama's Republican party once said, "As frank as I can be, we’re opposed to [restoring voting rights] because felons don’t tend to vote Republican."

But is that true?

According to Traci Burch, it is not. She minutely studied the 2000 Bush-Gore election in Florida and concluded that Bush would have won the felon's vote.

Remember, first of all, that a majority of American felons are white, and most of them are male. White men tend to vote Republican.

Remember also that in some places felons can vote after a period of time, and that in others certain felons (thieves, minor drug dealers) can vote very quickly. So they can be studied. The data show that, first of all, felons are not great voters; roughly 10% turn out in Presidential election years, even in states that make an effort to tell them they are eligible. Not very invested in the system, I guess. But to the extent that they do vote, they are not noticeably different from other men of their race, class, and age.

So this whole partisan wrangle about felons' voting rights is based on a mistake.

Personally I support voting rights for everyone, whether they vote for my side or not, because I just like for people to vote. But I confess I was surprised by this finding, and that always makes me wonder what other things I am getting wrong.

RIP Jack Welch

The Supreme Being decided today that former General Electric CEO Jack Welch had fallen into the bottom 10% of humanity by performance and terminated his life. Commentators said this was only fitting, since it was how Welch always treated his own employees:

Known for his focus on efficiency and streamlining management, he would regularly cull the lowest-performing 10% of staff each year. "The underperformers generally had to go," he wrote in one of his books.

To me Jack Welch and his General Electric always epitomized everything that was wrong with American business in the 1980s and 1990s. He had a maniacal focus on the bottom line that made stockholders rich while discarding employees like empty soda cans. Here are two evaluations:

Under him, GE’s market value grew from $12 billion to $410 billion, making Welch one of the most iconic corporate leaders of his era. . . .

The U.S. industrial belt is dotted with communities devastated by the downsizing of GE, which began under Welch and has continued in the years after. At its peak, for instance, GE employed 30,000 at a sprawling integrated industrial plant in Schenectady, New York, that now employs fewer than 3,000.

One of Welch's bizarre pronouncements was that every GE division had to be among the top two in the world for its sector; otherwise it would be closed or sold. This led to the company shedding profitable divisions because they didn't conform to his rigid mandate, a perfect case of arbitrary corporate policy harming actual human lives.

Not that Jack Welch ever showed any concern for actual human lives.

The most spectacular thing Welch did was to make GE a finance company, expanding its GE Capital arm until it became nearly half the company. Financially that made sense at the time, because in the 1980s and 1990s finance was where the money was. GE's manufacturing arms were being battered by Japanese and then Korean competition, but on Wall Street it was raking in the cash.

Not that it lasted; GE Capital crashed badly in 2008, requiring a Federal bailout and dragging the company down with it. The value of the corporation fell from $410 billion to $75 billion, and it is now valued at about $105 billion.

Jack Welch's GE is a perfect case study of what went wrong with America in the neoliberal era, and of why so many people on both the right and the left are angry about our direction.

Farewell Mayor Pete

Pete Buttigieg withdrew from the presidential race yesterday. I did not support him because he seemed to me like a bit of an ambitious empty suit, but I will remember him for moments of decency like this:

Buttigieg was the first major openly gay presidential candidate, and the wonder of that was how little it was talked about as his bid progressed. Rush Limbaugh, to whom Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in January, was more deviation than norm when he subsequently derided the possibility that Buttigieg, as the Democratic nominee, would be “kissing his husband onstage next to Mr. Man Donald Trump.”

And Buttigieg was in perfect form when asked during a CNN town hall to respond to that. “The idea of the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Donald Trump lecturing anybody on family values, I mean, sorry, but one thing about my marriage is it’s never involved me having to send hush money to a porn star after cheating on my spouse,” he said. “They want to debate family values, let’s debate family values. I’m ready.”

Withdrawal from Afghanistan

The US war in Afghanistan began with a cruise missile strike on October 7, 2001. Now it may finally be ending. The agreement we signed with the Taliban yesterday says that the US will withdraw all troops from the country within 14 months; the Taliban promised not to let forces that threaten the US occupy their territory, and to enter talks with the Afghan government.

Trump and Pompeo both emphasized that if the Taliban do not keep up their end of the bargain, it will unravel and "we go back." Seems to me the Taliban have a big incentive to make it work for 14 months to get the US out.

So we wash our hands of a country we could not mold in our image. It's what I have wanted for 15 years, but I don't feel particularly happy about it. Once we pull out either the war will grind on for years, or the Taliban will seize power, neither one an appetizing option.

It's just a sad situation for a country that has been cursed for two generations.